Forbidden Magic (Stolen Magic Book 4)

by Jayne Hawke

  As absurd as it was, I realized then that my mistress was a goddess. Even as I was striking at her again and again, working new esoteric magics with the gifts of a devoured coven and the energy of a stolen fortune, even as I watched her slip past and survive power nothing I would ever see could have, it wasn’t anything more or less than the fastness of her spirit that told me what I should always have known.

  I had declared war on the Goddess of Shadows.

  The megaminds arrived without fanfare. They always did. My first sign was the goddess’ reaction, a sudden pause in her advance, a hitch in her step that warned of dire circumstances. She and her people had pushed through trap after trap without a pause like that one. Less than a second after that, blades and bows of pure shadow swept into the hands of the pack, the ambivalence of the local shadows apparently overcome by the strength and presence of the megaminds. I wasn’t a gifted archer, as far as I knew none of us was, but with every arrow a thinking being I didn’t need to be. I drew and loosed as quickly as I could, my attention latched unchangingly onto the goddess even as she dodged and shadowstepped to avoid our attacks.

  The megaminds said nothing, offered neither strategy nor encouragement, but when they began to work it was impossible to question. The goddess’ movements were no longer perfect, the shadows that had given her purchase suddenly not quite enough to gracefully move between. A few arrows struck home, something that wasn’t quite blood and wasn’t quite shadow flying free, a few droplets that signalled a sea change. Still she approached.

  A step too far took her to the very edge of my ramp and triggered the last of Jess’ work. I remembered the liquid suns I’d traded for after the faery bridge when I saw a new sun come up, knew the truth with the lights of a dozen suns rising. A pillar of ash spelled out FUCK THE SHADOW GODDESS’ MUM.

  When the suns came, the megaminds swept into action. They were in perfect tandem, the impossibly deep shadows cast by the suns tools in a working I would never fully understand, and they were accompanied by an uncountable number of living shadows sweeping around like a colony of geometrically impossible bats. I recognized the absurd pranks we’d pulled, the ring of scaffold and the malformed bridge, and when they landed on the battlefield with the dozen suns behind them I laughed until my stomach hurt. I didn’t know what else to do.

  The worshippers were catching up again, the ice successfully traversed, moving at a subdued run that showed their complete faith in the goddess’ abilities. I had estimated them to be in the battalion range, but as it stood there was no reason to think we weren’t looking at more than a thousand fools willing to die for a goddess who would never see the god plane.

  Elijah made use of his enhanced voice to give a long sequence of commands. I didn’t hear my name, which meant I didn’t need to know. My love was the alpha, but he knew where his limits lay. Part of me wanted direction, something to focus on, but the truth was no one really understood what my magic could do.

  A quick look at the battleground Elijah had created showed that he was looking for a killing blow. It seemed smarter to rely on the fortification to me, but he knew his people. The pack’s goal was undeniable, their ferocity focused entirely on the goddess, and Niles was close behind. Adrian continued his barrage while Shani stood halfway between me and the goddess, part bodyguard and part vanguard. I didn’t know if Elijah had given them instructions or if they’d simply chosen the same path he had, but more and more forces were piling onto the goddess’ shoulders.

  I wanted to rush her, but I was the bait not the trap. I needed to trust the pack, even if that was a hard pill to swallow after the tactical shit show of the day. They had shown themselves to be competent again and again. This wasn’t the time to let myself waver in that certainty. The goddess’ people definitely wouldn’t.

  Even as they struck out for the heart of the battle, I was forced to begin thinning the worshippers simply to keep them from overwhelming us by weight of numbers. My arrows may have been formed of shadows whose loyalty wavered by the moment, but that didn’t give them any disadvantage at the core of the fight. It felt like I was driving back a tide, throwing rocks at the oncoming sea, and even as I continued to massacre the enemy the flow was not stymied. Their numbers were falling, the line visibly failing as the megaminds and their allies cut through them in masses, but they were unfazed, unslowed.

  The goddess bypassed the pack and Niles entirely, flitting past them without a second look. Though Shani managed to intercept her, she was not stopped, and I looked into her eyes and knew that she wouldn’t be stopped until I held her in my hands. I drew my life blade, not trusting the shadows so close to their goddess, and threw myself at my personal divinity. The sword struck flesh, the attack taking her by surprise while she had lost a moment’s focus to Shani’s exquisite swordsmanship. I saw anger in her eyes, an emotion that seemed at once perfectly at home and entirely alien to her, like a relic of another life finding its way back to its owner’s hands.

  She snatched for my throat, but I ducked and slashed at her arm. She shadowstepped away and leapt back, again grasping. She could have brought a sword out at any time, formed anything she needed of shadow with less effort than it took me to breathe. She continued to try and grapple for me even so, her technique sloppy to the point of being amateurish. She needed to get a hold of me...

  I felt ropes slip over me from behind and panicked, shadowstepping to the far side of the field only to find a glowing harness still criss-crossing my torso. The other end was in Shani’s hand. She gave me a reassuring smile and tied her end around her waist. Before I could discover her purpose, the goddess had me. She wrenched me to her, and the world disappeared.

  Twenty-One

  The place we landed was a sea of sensation, a constantly shifting omnichrome dreamscape that gave every impression of being orderly and reasonable but somehow had no perceptible objects or limitations. I could feel the rope around me, the painfully tight grip of the goddess holding me in place, and most of all Infinity hiding in my hair, waiting for the most dramatic moment to strike out – as was his wont - but there were other sensations, impossible sensations connected to nothing. Scents I had no names for swept across my face, sounds ranging from the gentle tinkle of windchimes to the jarring, body-shaking vibration of a massive base speaker pressed against me, senses I didn’t know, didn’t believe I even had tickled and terrorized.

  It was like my nerves were misfiring, the reports from my senses bringing false data. There was nothing about this place that my mind could usefully process, only a sea of feeling. I felt the rope begin to tug at me, drawing me away to nowhere in particular. From nowhere in particular. Its pull was constant, but the sensation was one among an infinity. Only the goddess felt real here, and when her voice began in my ear I was relieved to have one more sense provided with a concrete certainty, even if that certainty was of an assailant that had stolen me away from the world itself.

  “Here you will fight for me. The things here were once like me, but their champions failed them. Those champions are gone, their names lost to history, their memories lost to those who loved them. Only their gods remember them, remember them solely to curse them with every breath. You have lived well on my gifts, and now you will serve your purpose. Cut a path for me from here to the home of the gods and you will live on in legend while I live on in my rightful place. Fail and we fail together.”

  With that, she shoved me forward. Before I could drown in the sea of feeling, Infinity moved along my skin, pressing himself to my face and sinking in as if adhering to the surface of my mind. My senses quieted, the world going dank and cool and grey like the moment of stillness before a winter rainstorm. I knew that this was wrong, not the truth of this place, but neither had what I had seen before been truth. Whatever there was to see here, it was beyond my comprehension. This grimy facsimile was more useful, so it was the one I would keep.

  There was one colour remaining, I realized, the gleaming bronze of the rope that still bound me
to Shani. Wherever I was, whatever between place held my final battle, it connected to the earth plane, if only by the thinnest of tethers. If I could survive long enough to learn the magic here, I could follow that tether home.

  In the meantime, I began to explore. The area around me looked like a dungeon sketched in pencil. I followed a set of stairs up, carefully avoiding missed strokes, unsure whether they were invisible or actually absent and having no interest in discovering the truth.

  I could feel the shadows around me, use my shadowstep freely as if the entire world was shadow, but there was no sentience to anything. Normally even the most rudimentary of shadows drawn from the shadow plane, that is to say those I used in my magic, had intelligence. Sometimes that intelligence was on the level of an alien divinity, like the megaminds, and others it was no more complex than an insect with the potential for abstract thought entirely absent, but it was always there. These shadows could be worked with, given instructions, but otherwise were like the earth plane shadows that the shadowplane drew itself from. I reached my mind out to Infinity and was relieved to find his rambunctious, curious mind still intact. I pressed images back and forth with him, using the contact to soothe my mind, but I had to keep my focus on the world around me.

  The magic here was similar to the sidhe, not elemental or connected to anything in particular but rather free and wild, capable of almost anything with enough strength and focus. I wished the sidhe were freer with their gifts, more willing to sell the magic on to the rest of us. I understood why they didn’t, it wasn’t as if I would be in any rush to sell my witch magic even given the chance, but a lifetime of experience with everything but what this place had to offer in immense amounts seemed a tragic waste just then.

  I continued to walk through hallways of grey almost-bricks, finding nothing and no one but knowing that I had to keep moving. As I did, I played with the magic, forming little follies and mimicries of familiar elements. None of it was even a fraction as powerful as what I had wielded scant minutes before, but I could feel its potential. With a year here, I could make this magic perform miracles even the sidhe had never dreamed. I could create a universe of my own with enough time, perform magic so complex and so perfect that each spell would be a plane unto itself.

  It occurred to me that I had no idea how long this was expected to take, how many lost and forgotten gods were held here. I’d envisioned a battle of hours, days at most, expected to turn a corner and find a greyscale arena with the goddess’ exit on the far side, and once I no longer had her to govern my movements – and I was quite certain that she was never far away, prepared to remind me of my task on a moment’s notice – the task of returning home a quick and dirty trifle. The fact was, there was no reason to think I wouldn’t be facing down a legion of opponents, entire pantheons who’d lost whatever divine wager, war, or litigation it was that stood between gods and fallen.

  “Time alone will tell,” I said, comforted by the sound of my own voice. “Nothing to do but wander and prepare. Maybe create a stray universe or two to keep busy.”

  I drew on a bit of magic, a slippery jelly that felt like it should leave a film but didn’t. I squished it around in the magical webwork of my own witch magic, idly toying with it to tease out its properties while I walked. I once again wished that I’d found more fae magic to work with, even just bought a few bags of pixie dust to see what I could make of it. Perhaps if I’d kept Castor around, he would have been able to prepare me for this.

  With the thought of Castor, I wanted to cry. I didn’t know if it was true that he’d worked to protect me from this final duty or that he had made sacrifices on my behalf, but it felt true. It had the heavy, tight grasp of a guilty truth too long ignored. I’d chosen the pack over him, hadn’t even considered taking that final risk to reconcile the two before I turned on him. It felt like the right thing to do when I did it. Was that enough?

  I felt the magic I’d been exploring begin to take shape as a spell, felt the spread of mystic potential. I struggled to guide it into something useful, something that would work in combat, and when I loosed it into the hundredth empty room I’d passed through it sped out as a massive, spiny hand. It flew around the room, searching for a target, and eventually found a hallway to speed down with deadly certainty.

  So that was new.

  I ran back through what I’d been doing with it and could find nothing in particular. I hadn’t formed it into a spell, hadn’t really formed it into anything. What I had done, though, was to allow my emotions over Castor run rampant, envisioned them as a heavy, grasping, painful thing. A thing like a massive, spikey stone hand. Even with that tiny, experimental bit of magic, my emotions had created a dangerous spell with a mind of its own that had sped off to seek its fortune. I decided to follow the hand, seeing no meaningful difference between its direction and any other. I couldn’t have created something like that with Earth plane magic without months of research and preparation. I couldn’t even think where I’d begin to.

  If I was the only witch on this plane, if the gods that had been marooned here were single-purpose virtuosos like the shadow goddess, this battle was going to be quick and incredibly bloody. If the long-rumoured witch god was here, on the other hand, the theorized deity who had created witches in their own image and been forgotten, that was going to be a very different sort of battle.

  I began to grasp the magic that suffused this place and apply it to different emotions, working on a one-woman method acting masterclass and wishing I’d spent my life a little more in touch with that side of myself. It was all very straightforward, if your mind worked in metaphors and feelings, powerful magic at the gentlest touch. If, on the other hand, you had trained your mind to systematize and suppress, it was like learning to run on your hands – unintuitive, frustrating, and above all else exhausting.

  I had to stop after a while, my mind still sharp and my magical strength still intact but my emotional state an absolute fucking mess. It felt like I’d won the lottery, watched my family murdered, and seen the rise and fall of an empire over the course of the last hour. The magic I’d made was incredible, my ego revelling in its strength and creativity, but the cost was not something I was equipped to pay. Maybe I could just use ego spells.

  When I finally found my first target, it was sitting under a pile of stone that had clearly been my guilt hand in a former life. If there had been any fight in the pitiable pile of offal to begin with, the stone had done its job disturbingly well. I suspected that only the permanence of divine flesh had kept whatever it had once been from turning to dust long ago. Death would have been a kindness, but it wasn’t something I could grant. The price for trying and failing was horribly high.

  I felt the goddess’ emotions rise for a moment, a tiny blip of pity, fear, and contempt before she was gone. She knew she could become like this but believed she couldn’t. It seemed to me we all had things that sat on that line, but hers was a dangerous conceit.

  I pushed on, feeling like I should say a few words but having nothing to say. I let the emotion of it stay with me, held it with gentle hands so that it could neither overwhelm nor be entirely suppressed. Emotion was the most precious of resources, a deadly poison I could neither bottle nor afford to waste. I would develop an organ for it, a place in my soul that it could burn without consuming, and when the time came it would do its job well.

  The frequency of divines began to pick up quickly after that. I passed through galleries of weeping, stumbling, emaciated creatures of every description, animals and humans and strange conceptual oddities that rolled or bounced or gnawed at the floor. Few even seemed to notice me, and those that did swiped at me with forced aggression incompatible with bodies battered by past champions or devoured by madness and time. Even if death was not a possibility for the gods, decay most certainly was. What it was that made a god fall to the edge of nothing like this I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, but the emotional miasma of the sights, even – perhaps especially – when rende
red in the monochrome of Infinity’s perceptual filter, was numbing. I kept it with me because I didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how much I’d need before the trip was done. Even numbness was an emotion of a sort, and the magic of it would have its day.

  I pressed on, taking turns apparently at random. Increasingly, I seemed to know where I was going, one identical hall looking correct where its neighbour looked like a diversion. Wherever we were going, we were getting there. The gods seemed to be gaining life, their madness more vivid and their pallor less deathly. A few of them managed to raise weapons and make some attempt to impede me. I put them down as gently as I could, a shadowy blackjack sufficient. I wasn’t a soft woman, but neither was I going to increase the pain of those who had seen more of it than anything could deserve.

  At long last, I reached the coliseum I’d been waiting for. The grey stone gave way to grey sand and grey grass. The walls rose beyond sight, lined with theatre boxes rendered in the same pencil-wrought stone as the rest of this place, each holding nothing and no one. I wondered if this had been some object of amusement for the gods in time immemorial, Zeus and Hera sitting in one box, Odin in another, Bast in a third while the champion of a god they had cast out fought the gods that had not remained cast out when they were told.

  On the far side lay a long hallway that seemed to glow despite the grey, like the drawing was being lit from behind by a projector’s light, and at the end of it something that wasn’t quite a wall blocking the exit.

  “Take me there and you will stand beside Hercules and the Monkey King in eternal memory,” said the goddess, not surprising me in the least as she spoke from inches behind my right ear. She seemed to be attached to me now, an aura or a residue running down my back.