Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  Following directly on her attack came Alison herself, her face a mask of fury, with her solicitor Warrick Locke right beside her. He seemed to be unarmed, but she had a wicked-looking knife in one hand—a ritual blade, maybe, but it was also a real weapon, and he and Eleanor were unarmed. He gripped his stick like a quarterstaff, but he knew that he wouldn't be of much help with his leg ready to give out at any moment.

  Real fire, physical fire, suddenly sprang up in a circle around them, following the line of the shields and setting fire to the undergrowth. It was a waist-high perimeter of flame that kept Alison and her minions from getting at her victims physically.

  Reggie couldn't do exactly the same thing—but he could call a storm-wind, to lash at their adversaries with the branches of trees and bushes—and he did. Carolyn shrieked with indignation, and Warrick Locke ducked.

  "Get them!" Alison shouted furiously over the howling wind, as her hair escaped from its pins and whipped in tendrils around her head, like the snakes of a Medusa.

  Reggie expected another attack on their shields, and indeed, one came, a dull blow that actually drove the shields back a little. It didn't matter; the Elemental Fire devoured the rest of the attack, and the line of physical fire simply followed the shields, and Locke shook his head, when Alison gestured furiously at him.

  And the glow of power faded a bit from the megaliths. He felt his heart leap—either she was losing control of it and it was sliding back into quiescence, or else she was draining it with her attacks. In either case, unless she found another source of power soon, she would be reduced to her own resources—

  That was the moment when she seized Warrick Locke's wrist, shouted something incomprehensible—

  And Locke screamed in fear and pain, falling to his knees, as he aged fifty years in a handful of seconds. A few seconds more, and Alison dropped his wrist, and the lifeless, withered hulk of what had been a man fell to the side, no longer moving.

  Where did she get that? He knew what it was, in theory. Earth Masters healed—and so could harm. They grew—and so knew how to destroy. They could give life—and take it. It was what made them so dangerous when they went to the bad. Shocked to the core, Reggie just stared.

  Both her daughters were equally shocked, and as a consequence, didn't react quickly enough when their mother seized both of their wrists. "No!" he shouted—not that he cared for them, and they had certainly been ready to consign him to whatever fate Alison had prepared for him, but no one should die like that—

  But Alison was evidently not ready to kill her own flesh and blood. Quite.

  Though the creatures she cast aside, first Carolyn, then Lauralee, were never going to attract anyone's attention again, except as objects of pity.

  Alison turned towards them again, her eyes glowing with rage and power, her hands crooked into claws. And all around her, the stones were incandescent with terrible power.

  She gestured with a crooked finger, and the earth rose in a wave and crushed out the physical fire over half of the periphery of the shields, leaving behind only the shields of Elemental Fire and Air themselves as protection.

  Eleanor swallowed down fear and nausea, and tried to think. Their shields weren't going to hold, not for long, since they were feeding off nothing but her own strength. There had to be a way to stop her!

  She held onto Reggie's arm, and backed up a step, so that he did the same. A slow, terrible smile stretched Alison's lips in a dreadful mockery of pleasure. She gestured again, and this time it was a horde of those horrible gnome-things that rose up out of the raw earth and flung themselves at the shields.

  Eleanor gathered her wits, and called her Salamanders.

  Once again, faithful and protective, they came, leaping out of the flames of the dying fires, dashing towards Alison's gnomes.

  But they were joined by something Eleanor had never seen before; slender, sinuous things like legless dragons. They didn't seem to have much in the way of attacking ability, but whenever they whipped themselves around a Salamander, the Fire Elemental grew markedly larger or brighter—or both.

  The Salamanders reached the line of gnomes, and this time, the gnomes didn't run.

  There were more of them than there were Salamanders, and they swarmed the Fire Elementals, threatening to pull them down. But whatever the Salamanders came into contact with burst into flame.

  The Salamanders weren't getting off unscathed, however; the gnomes had heavy clubs and spears, and they were perfectly prepared to use them.

  Then a dozen of them got through, and Reggie lurched forwards to interpose himself between them and her. Two frantic Salamanders raced towards them, and a Sylph, a delicate, winged creature, suddenly popped into existence, hovering in midair. The Salamanders got one each, and the fairy-like being might have looked delicate, but she accounted for the other four with her bow and arrows.

  But not before two of the got to Reggie, and while he was fending one off with his staff, the second ducked under a blow and smashed into Reggie's bad knee with his club.

  Reggie toppled over with a choked-off cry of agony, as the winged girl filled the evil creature with three swift arrows in succession.

  With a wordless cry of fury, Eleanor reached for more power—in what might have been an unexpected place. Not to the physical fires being extinguished by more gnomes, but down—down past the layer of Earth where Alison's power lay, down past the planet's stony skin, down into the place where the Earth itself gave way to Fire, and the molten rock showed which of the Powers was stronger—

  "No!" It was Alison's turn to shout, as she concentrated all of her anger and fury on Eleanor.

  The fury began to take shape, rising out of the earth before them.

  A Giant.

  Not the sort that Jack had met at the top of his beanstalk. That Giant, uncouth as he had been, was a paragon of intelligence and sophistication next to this thing.

  It was made of the earth that it rose from. Near-shapeless, it had a blob of rancid clay for a head, with two holes gouged out for eyes, at the bottom of each of which glowed the same, sickly-yellow light as suffused the stones. A misshapen lump defined a nose, and beneath that, was an empty yawn of a mouth. It had no neck to speak of; the head seemed to grow directly from the moss-covered, massive shoulders. And as yet, it had no discernable arms or legs—

  That changed in a moment; a club-like arm with undifferentiated mitten-hands reached out, snatched up a battling gnome and Salamander together, and tossed them both into its gaping maw, devouring them both with a single gulp.

  It grew a trifle, and reached out for another pair of fighters—

  Horrified, Eleanor looked away for a moment—and caught sight of Alison.

  Her stepmother was transfixed by the battle; partly because she was pouring everything she had into her creation, and partly in mesmerized pleasure at the carnage.

  But she had forgotten something.

  She had dropped her additional protections, relying only on her old, unaugmented shields.

  And Eleanor now knew how to unweave those—she had used the same key on her shields as she had on the spells binding Eleanor to the hearthstone.

  Reggie had struggled to his good knee and was staring in horror at the giant, shaking in every limb, his eyes wide. She grabbed his arm and shook it. He wrenched his gaze away from the giant and looked up at her. His face was so pale he looked like a corpse.

  "We have one chancel" she shouted, over the bass growls of the giant. "Help me!"

  From somewhere, he dragged up the final dregs of his courage. Life came back into his eyes.

  "Her shields!" she cried, "Forget about the giant—drop our shields, then come in, Air and Fire together, and follow my lead—

  He nodded; he dropped the staff and she crouched beside him; they clasped hands and let their own shields go.

  Alison howled in triumph; the giant echoed it, and wrenched himself up further out of the earth.

  Alison's shields flickered as she le
t the last of her concentration slip from them.

  And together, a single melded lance of Fire and Air struck at the weakest point, blasting it away—and the shields unraveled.

  Alison faltered, and took a single step back. The loss of her shields confused her for one vital moment.

  And the giant turned, wrenching its body completely out of the ground. It stared at her for several long seconds; her eyes widened, as she realized in that instant that she was unprotected—

  —and that all around her were creatures she had forced to obey her with whatever weapon came to hand. Creatures who saw her momentarily unprotected.

  Like the giant that she had just created out of earth and blood and pain.

  She looked up at it with her mouth open. It looked down at her.

  And then, it fell upon her, burying her alive in a mound of freshly-turned soil before she could make a sound.

  The last of the gnomes swarmed over the mound, burying themselves into the ground where she had been.

  And suddenly, there was silence—except for the mindless whimpering of the two creatures that had once been Carolyn and Lauralee.

  Reggie sank slowly to the ground, his teeth gritted against the agony of his ruined knee—slowly, only because Eleanor caught him as he fell and eased him down. That took the last of her strength, and all she could do was to hold him as the remaining Salamanders curled around them both, keeping them warm and protected, and wait for dawn, help, or both.

  Epilogue

  November 25, 1917

  Somerville College Oxford University

  SOME OF THE GIRLS THOUGHT the little studies in Somerville College were cramped and shabby. Then again, some of the girls were accustomed to the kind of accommodation one found at Longacre Park ... for Eleanor, even if the study had been the size and bleakness of her garret room at The Arrows, it still would have been paradise. A raw November wind rattled the windows, but she had a fine fire going (and before long, someone with less access to wood or a more slender budget for coal would be around to "borrow" a log or two). One of the scouts had managed tea and toast; Eleanor had jam and butter from Sarah by parcel this morning. All was right with the world.

  Eleanor poured her visitor another cup of tea with a feeling of unreality. It still seemed an impossibility that she was here, settled in Oxford, a student at last in Somerville College.

  "So," asked Doctor Maya, stirring honey from the Longacre hives into her tea in lieu of unobtainable sugar. "How are you enjoying life as a student of literature?"

  "It's incredible," Eleanor replied. "I keep thinking I'm going to wake up in my bed in the garret and it will all have been a dream."

  "And the studies?" Maya persisted, giving her a penetrating look. "They're going well?"

  Eleanor laughed; she knew what Maya was thinking. That Reggie's proximity would be a powerful distraction. Little did she know that he was harder on her than her tutor, and she was harder on herself than both of them put together. "I think my generation is going to be a trial to those who follow us," she told the doctor. "Those of us who are here are determined to prove that we can be as valuable as the ones who left to become VADs or do some other sort of war-work. And when Oxford grants us degrees—which they will—we are going to be among the first in line to demand ours. Compared to what Alison kept me at, this is light duty." She sighed, but it was with content. "And compared to how I've been living at The Arrows, this place is a delight. Reggie keeps us both supplied with wood for the fireplaces from Longacre, and with other things, too. I find I can get a lot of help when I need it in trade for an egg or a jar of honey."

  Maya tsked wryly. "You're a regular black-marketeer. I'll have to demand a bribe of some of those eggs to keep quiet, I'm afraid. They can't be had for any price in London."

  Eleanor laughed. She was doing a lot of that these days. She didn't remember much past Alison's demise. She'd been drained almost to fainting, and Reggie was unconscious when Lady Virginia appeared like an avenging angel and carried them both off to Longacre. Lady Devlin hadn't known what to think—at first she had, with some bewilderment, tentatively welcomed Eleanor as the hitherto-unknown stepdaughter of her friend Alison Robinson.

  Then the situation rapidly unraveled. It had been decided to say nothing about Alison, Warrick Locke, and the girls; the farmer upon whose land the Hoar Stones stood had found the autos, the body of Locke, and the two near-witless sisters. Constables digging in the churned-up earth had turned up the body of Alison, but other than that, no one could make heads or tails of why the four were out there in the first place, nor what had turned two young women into withered hags nor what had destroyed Locke. And, once Peter Almsley intervened on behalf of the War Office, country constables being what they were, it was decided that it was best not to ask too many more questions that couldn't be answered. It was all written up that Locke had murdered Alison and buried her body, and that the shock had prematurely aged her daughters, who had killed Locke in a fit of insanity This was more than scandal, this was sensation, and Eleanor suddenly found herself unwelcome at Longacre Park.

  However, she was well on her feet by this time, and The Arrows was hers. Rightfully hers, as she found out when the lawyers came to see her. She didn't even need to lift a finger to do anything to help Carolyn and Lauralee if she chose not—

  But she was not hard-hearted enough to throw them onto the state. Since they were clearly not fit to stand trial, they were currently being cared for in an institution for the criminally insane—comfortably, at Eleanor's insistence and expense.

  Reggie's knee was shattered past all hope. Eleanor had met Maya when Lady Virginia had insisted that only Maya could or should tend to Reggie's injuries, and she and the doctor had hit it off immediately. Doctor Maya had done her best, but it was clear to her, and to the army surgeon who came to examine him, that he would never fly in combat again. Flying an aeroplane—at least, the current models—required having two good arms and legs.

  So he as soon as he had gotten a cast on the leg, he had put in for a transfer to the Oxford branch of the Royal Flying Corps training school. He'd been accepted, of course; with a record like his, they'd have been insane not to accept him. So he was here when Eleanor had enrolled for her first year as a university student, reading literature. Here, there was no Lady Devlin to have to placate, and they could meet as often as they liked, which was generally every day. "You haven't announced an engagement?" Maya asked. Eleanor shook her head, twisting the ring that Reggie had "unofficially" given her. "I want to have finished my studies and passed my vivas, even if they won't give me a degree yet. And by then, maybe Lady Devlin will have come around to the idea of having me as a daughter-in-law."

  Maya grimaced. "I'm sorry to hear that she's being an obstruction. Fortunately, that was not a problem in my case."

  But Eleanor only shrugged. "She can't help how she was brought up," she pointed out. "And besides . .. we have an ally. Or two, actually."

  Maya raised her eyebrows, as Eleanor carefully buttered a piece of toast. "I knew about Lady Virginia; she was fairly obvious, because if nothing else, she would want Reggie to marry another Master. Who else?"

  "The Brigadier." She blushed; the old fellow had been amazingly kind to her, and for the life of her, she didn't know why. Maybe it was just because he was fond of Reggie, and Reggie was clearly as blissfully happy in her presence as she was in his. "He's on our side, too. And I think he has—well, a kind of secret weapon. I think he's started to court Lady Devlin, and if he is, she'll find it hard to be against something that he's for." "Really!" Doctor Maya laughed. "Well, the sly old fox! He knew about Devlin being a Master, you know—one of the few people who aren't mages who ever do find out about us. I don't think he ever let Reggie know that he knew, but he's an old crony of Alderscroft, and that's where it all started. And it was partly his doing that Devlin met Reggie's mother in the first place. I don't know the details, but he introduced them at some point."

  "Ah," Eleanor
replied thoughtfully. "That explains a great deal." She took a sip of her tea. "At any rate, my magical studies are coming along well, too. My tutor thinks that the Tarot approach is a good one, so we're keeping on with it. And Reggie says that's another reason not to rush into a marriage; he says that before we even think about settling down, I need to have a firm control on my powers. Because children with Masters on both sides tend to be precocious when it comes to magic."

  She flushed a little; Maya pretended not to notice. "Talking about children already, is he?" she said, nodding. "In that case, I don't think I need to go and interrogate him about his intentions!"

  Eleanor flushed deeper. "Oh no, he's sound, definitely sound," she said, laughing and fanning her cheeks. "In fact, he's my best help aside from my official tutor. We have special permission to work at the Bodleian. The Vice-Principal doesn't like it, but since the Principal is another Elemental Master, she doesn't say much, she just glares at us when she sees us in public together." She shrugged. "She means well, and so I don't care. I've only been here for this term, and she has no idea what kind of student I am; she may think I'm here only so I can be near Reggie. As soon as she realizes I'm serious about my studies, she'll probably stop acting like a Mother Superior."