“I told you all this for a reason,” he added. “I wanted you to understand what is going on, and why your people must remain out of the way. The fragment will not distinguish between you and the Faerie and if you threaten it, it will strike back hard.”
“But…you are the fragment, aren’t you?”
His expression gave nothing away. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “You must warn your people to remain out of the way, or else your race will be destroyed as collateral damage. We are unstoppable and we have waited too long to complete the mission.”
I paused. “And the remainder of Faerie?” I asked. No one knew for sure, but I wanted to stall for time. I needed to think desperately. “Has it been destroyed?”
“The fragment doesn’t know,” my grandfather said. For a moment, he looked oddly scared – my grandfather was never scared of anything – and deeply worried. “It wants to reunite with the rest of its kind. You have to stay out of the way, boy…”
The world went white around me. A moment later, I was slammed onto a grassy knoll, gasping for breath. Aylia was right next to me, breathing hard. A second later, an aircraft fell out of the sky and crashed right in front of us.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The world works the way it does because of a set of physical principles. Those principles are inter-related enough that changing them enough to effectively deny us electricity, internal combustion engines, and all effective explosives would also change the way the world worked in huge and unpredictable ways.
-Dale R. Cozort
“Shield,” I yelled, reaching out and pulling all the magic I could to me, wrapping it around us as a force shield. I held the image in my mind of a sphere surrounding us, protecting us, and when the fireball rocketed over us it held against the wave of devastation. Everything was a flicker of bare pictures in my mind, like a movie reel; the jumbo jet, it’s fall, the explosion and the stark certainty that no one could possibly have survived.
Aylia screamed once, blood pouring down her face, as she added her energy to mind. Somehow, the field held, not least because we both desperately wanted the shield to hold, and knew that it would. Rational thought said that we were both dead, but rational thought had little place in a world of magic. I looked at her, saw blood trickling down from her nose and ears, and smiled as the magic spiralled around her. We had survived, barely.
“What happened?” Aylia asked, desperately. The flames were already abating – the aircraft had crashed into concrete ground meters away – but I could make out other plumes of smoke in the distance. I had lost track of time in the Mound, or when I was talking to the Forsaken, but it looked to be early morning. How long had we spent down in a Mound where time behaved so oddly? “Glass, what happened?”
“The jet fell out of the sky,” I said, my voice hollow. I had seen aircraft crash before, but I had never seen one fall out of the sky, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. It had suddenly surrendered to gravity and just fallen like a lead balloon. “Aylia…you’re in shock. Use a calming discipline, now.”
She nodded and concentrated. The blood was a sign of how much stress she had put on her abilities, a manifestation in the mundane world of magic, suggesting that she would rest before she burned herself out and killed herself. I doubted that she would have the time, even as the blood stopped dripping and faded away; the real damage was deep inside. Guardians are trained to push themselves right to the limits of their endurance, but Aylia hadn’t had the training, not yet. I clung to that thought. It was the promise of a better world afterwards.
“All right,” she said, finally. I had taken the moment to run my own calming disciplines and I had been shocked by how little magical reserves I had left. My powers had been drained by building and holding the shield. “What happened?”
“I saw the Forsaken,” I said, flatly. Odd concepts were bubbling along in my mind, just under the surface, but the more I tried to look at them, the more they faded away into the darkness. “I saw…”
A nasty thought struck me. “Check your cell phone,” I ordered, digging into my pockets. Vincent Faye and his guards hadn’t bothered to try to disconnect me from the pocket dimension that I created, years ago, knowing that as long as I was chained up, I couldn’t access anything I had with me. Or, perhaps, he was struggling with the Forsaken influence in his mind. “Try and call someone.”
My cell phone was dead, a useless hunk of plastic, and I swore. I dug back into the pocket dimension and found other items, including a GPS receiver and a small surveillance device. Both of them were stone cold dead. The GPS receiver lit up briefly and then died; the bug simply refused to activate at all. I pulled out a portable radio and a Game Gear, but they were dead as well. Aylia’s cell phone was dead as well.
“I don’t understand,” Aylia said, puzzled. “Have the batteries been drained?”
I looked back towards the New York skyline. Even in morning, the city should have been glowing with light. The skyscrapers were never dark, but they were now; I couldn’t see a single hint of electric power anywhere I looked. I listened, hoping to hear a car or a light aircraft, and heard nothing. It was as dark and silent as the grave.
“The city is dead,” I said. I didn’t believe the words even as I spoke them, but suddenly some of the Forsaken words came back to me. They couldn’t live in our universe – hell, they could barely manifest in Faerie – so they were altering it to suit their needs. “Concentrate. Try a small spell.”
I focused on a spell that should have had a tiny flame dancing on the end of my finger. It billowed into existence, but I was so drained that it flickered out of existence a moment later. Aylia could muster a much larger flame, but the moment after she created it she staggered, barely able to stand. Our magic had been drained to the point where it might take hours to regain enough energy to teleport, or travel anywhere else.
“The magic is working,” I said, finally, “but not technology. I wonder if…”
A nastier thought had just struck me. I reached into my pocket and produced a silver six-shooter Cowboy had given me as a gift, claiming that it would give me an air of distinction. I checked the bullets – silver, naturally, as well as a handful of deadly charms – pointed the gun at the wall, and pulled the trigger. The gun banged and the bullet ricocheted off the wall, bouncing somewhere into the darkness. I felt a great wave of relief passing through me and I sagged. I think if Aylia hadn’t caught me I would have collapsed.
“Electric power doesn’t work,” I guessed. The alternative was that all of the power in my tools – and on the aircraft – had been drained instantly by…something. I could feel it, right at the edge of my perception, but it hurt to look too closely at it. It wasn’t magic, but something else, something different. That alone pretty much proved that it was the work of the Forsaken. If they had altered the universe to prevent the smooth flow of electric current…
“Or maybe they’ve done something else,” Aylia said, when I explained my reasoning. She tapped the side of her head meaningfully. “I have an electric current in here as well and so do you. Why aren’t we dead?”
“Point taken,” I agreed. She was right, of course. There were electric charges in almost every living creature. Unless the change in the universe only prevented power from building up beyond a certain level, it had to be something else. I kept remembering what the Forsaken had said about the different universes. If it were altering the laws of our universe to match its own…what would happen to humanity? “I wish I had a good answer.”
I leaned against the wall and, for the first time, looked around. We had materialised in the middle of an industrial estate, but one that had clearly been shut down years ago as a result of the economic collapse. Several buildings were blazing away merrily after the jet had crashed down on top of them, but others were intact. I should have used a fire-dampening charm, I realised, but what was the point? I couldn’t summon the energy to put out even a tiny blaze.
“Come with me,” I
said, and led her towards a large factory complex that had seen better days. I wasn't surprised to see no sign of any occupation. A complex like this, boarded up and abandoned, had probably been colonised by hundreds of supernatural creatures. God knew what might be lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t have time to be careful. We slipped in through a door that had been left ajar, found our way up to the third level – where the manager had worked, I guess – and peered through the window. It looked down towards a road below – I wasn't even sure where we were; New York had never been my town – but I could see hundreds of cars, all stranded in the road.
“Oh, hell,” I said. I had hoped that the effect was limited, but it had clearly knocked out cars as well. The field had only come into existence minutes ago, I realised; the cars were probably packed with people trying to go to work. Very few of them would drive in to work during the night time these days, not for love or money. No one wanted to commit suicide for their pointy-haired boss. “Aylia, I think we’re in trouble.”
“I know,” Aylia said. “How far has the field spread?”
I shook my head helplessly. Science produced effects that spread in a manner that could be understood and predicted, or countered, if that were the requirement. Magic tended to be far less predicable and controllable. The new power the Forsaken had introduced was so far beyond our understanding that it might as well be – I smiled at the bad joke – magic. It might have blanketed the entire United States, or the entire world, or maybe even the Solar System. I looked up towards the rising sun and shook my head. If the field had reached the sun, it would have put it out and that would have been the end of life on Earth.
“There’s no way to know,” I said. I concentrated, trying to access my own reserves. The irony was that if I could get back to my house, I could draw on the power I’d stored there for emergencies. There were some witches who developed links to other witches who could draw on their power anywhere, but it was a vulnerability that a determined enemy could exploit. If cut…the effects could be fatal. “How far can you teleport?”
“Normally,” Aylia sad, bitterly, “I could teleport across the entire United States.”
I nodded. Teleporting spells are…odd. It should be possible to teleport around the entire world, but no magician I knew of had managed to do any such thing. The most anyone seemed to be able to jump was a thousand miles or so. It was possible to jump around the world in successive jumps, but it was yet another thing about magic that made little sense.
“Leave it for now,” I said, digging back into my pack. I produced a handful of Army-issue energy bars and passed her a couple. “Eat these and listen carefully.”
I chewed my energy bar carefully – the guy who invented them was either incompetent or had a sadistic sense of humour, as they taste about as good as my old boots – and told her everything I’d learned from the Forsaken. She hadn’t experienced anything during our mad rush to teleport away from the black pool, but she had seen enough of it to guess that we had been looking directly at the Forsaken itself, and it had been too vast for us to comprehend. The thought bothered me. It was possible for humans to beat the Faerie – they stuck to their rules, even though there were times when humans wished they wouldn’t – but the Forsaken were so far beyond us that they might as well be gods. The odd thing was that I believed the story my grandfather’s image had told me, but even if it were completely true, what right did they have to wreck our world on their private vendetta?
“They were under our nose all this time and we never knew,” Aylia said. “Do you think the Faerie knew?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “They are already within the walls of your castle.”
Aylia blinked at me. “I beg your pardon?”
“Drak Bibliophile – the dragon – told me that they were already within the walls of my castle,” I said, grimly. “I didn’t understand what he meant. I even wondered if he meant you, or Varsha, or someone else who was already near me. He meant the silent Mound and the Forsaken lying dormant within it. Look to the children of magic, he said; the children of magic are the Faerie. We didn’t look hard enough.”
I cursed under my breath. “I wonder if you can strangle a dragon.”
“You couldn’t get your hands around his neck,” Aylia said, practically. “You couldn’t get a line of twenty hands around his neck, and even if you did, actually strangling him would be difficult. Glass…what are we going to do?”
I looked back down towards the lines of stalled cars. A handful of people were already walking back towards the city, others were just sitting in their cars, fearful that something might leap out of nowhere and attack them. Years ago, there had been many dangers on the roads, but they had all been human. The supernatural creatures had wiped out the wreckers and raiders and replaced them with a far darker threat.
“If electric power is off all over the United States, there’s going to be anarchy,” I said, grimly. I’d seen projections from some of the more secretive government offices, suggesting that the spread of magic would eventually lead to it replacing our laws of science. “The transport links won’t work, so entire cities will starve and die out, their populations trying to flee to a safety that won’t exist. Even if guns continue to work, the police and the army aren’t going to be able to keep a lid on the chaos; hell, people are going to be running very short of water. It could be the end of the human race.”
Aylia stared at me. “Glass,” she said, again, “what are we going to do?”
“Fucked if I know,” I said, practically. I was too tired to think properly. I wanted to go home, crawl under the covers and stay there for the next few years. “We should go back to the Circle and report in, if we can, and see what is being done to control the situation.” I snorted to myself. We hadn’t been in control since the first wave of magic had returned to the land. “If you want to go somewhere else…”
“No, thank you,” Aylia said, primly. She stared down at the Beauty Stone. “I can’t believe that that was my father, in the end, or even the brat.”
“Perhaps it wasn't,” I said. I wanted to offer her comfort, but what could I say? My family had always been good to me. “The Forsaken did suggest that it had been influencing your family for a very long time. It clearly knew more about the laws of magic than your father, or anyone else, and was able to help him grow in power in exchange for his help. It even infected your sister and turned her into its ally.”
Or maybe not, I thought, silently. Humanity had far too many idiots willing to make a deal with the devil if they thought it would put them on top. Alassa might have believed that it would make her the Queen of Magic, or even the Queen of Earth, but was that really what the Forsaken had promised? I reviewed my last memories of her as she was swept up by the expanding dark pool, and shivered. Was she now part of the Forsaken multiplicity, or was she dead? There was no way to know for sure,
“The brat always wanted to get her own way and never mind who got hurt,” Aylia said, coldly. “I used to dote on her. Instead…”
I reached out and put an arm around her, but she shrugged it off angrily. “Is there any point in doing anything these days?” She asked. “Is there any point in anything?”
“There are always the people,” I said, dryly. “The young, the innocent, the ones who don’t want to be part of our world…isn’t protecting them worthwhile?”
“And some of them hate you,” Aylia pointed out. “I used to read some of the more extreme websites. They used to think that the Guardians were never anything other than tools of government oppression, trying to keep magic under their control.”
“No one has magic under their control,” I said. That might not have been true any longer. “We step in and try to keep the peace, we stop a few bastards from hurting other bastards – or innocent people – and we talk very quickly. When all else fails, we stamp on trouble as quickly and brutally as we can, just to prevent a minor incident from growing out of control. Anyway…”
I took her hand
and focused, gathering the energy to teleport. I had worried, although I hadn’t said so to her, that we wouldn’t be able to build up the power reserves necessary to teleport, but we were lucky. I muttered the spell under my breath – I hadn’t had to do that since basic training – and we vanished in a flash of light. A moment later, we flickered into existence at the Circle.
“She’s with me,” I said, to Mrs Pringle, when she fixed Aylia with a death glare. “Where’s the Director?”
“He’s trying to cope with the crisis,” Mrs Pringle said. I was so relieved to see that her computer was working fine that I almost fainted, which would have provided her with a great deal of amusement. “What do you know about it?”
Varsha must have given him my note, I thought. “That’s for his ears,” I said, firmly. It wasn't something I was going to discuss in the lobby, not when anyone could hear it. Messengers were running back and forth, their faces twisted with panic and fear. They knew that it could be the end of humanity. “Where is he?”
Guardian Glass Page 32