Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004

by Lisa Jane Smith

  Like the fight, the next few moments seemed much longer than they really were. The Janie-creature was pinned below her, eyes still wide and blank as it clawed and kicked. The sword was high in the air, but the feeling of life that had been there when she’d raised it in Morgana’s house was missing. Still, it was a weapon.

  She looked down at the Janie-thing. Then she looked across the room.

  Janie herself had fallen back against a cabinet, sprawled, panting. Her face was as pale as the face of the nightgowned Janie on the floor, but her eyes met Alys’s with intelligence and human understanding. She dragged in a deep breath and nodded, once.

  Alys shut her eyes and raised the sword, which simply shook in her hands. She couldn’t do it. A sob broke out of her throat and she started to pull back, to throw the sword away. Beneath her the sob was echoed by an animal snarl. Her eyes flew open and she found herself staring in shock at tawny fur and sharp teeth. With a gasp, she brought the point of the sword down with all her strength, pinning the bobcat to the floor.

  Spitting, hissing, the creature tried to twist away, its golden eyes filled with fire and malevolence.

  “Alys, hold on! Keep it there! Don’t let go!”

  She couldn’t answer, but she dodged a murderous swipe of razor claws and gripped the sword hilt with both hands. Before her appalled gaze the tawny pelt of the bobcat melted and she was sitting astride a bucking, heaving dark mound. Black beavers from Mordor, she thought dizzily and tried to jam the sword in deeper. There was a low yowl which became a loud hiss. A forked tongue flickered out of a scaly lizard’s face—a face with remarkably human blue eyes. The hiss became a thick bubbling noise and a tail smacked into the ground hard behind her. The sword was impaling a creature like a sea lion, whose muscles rippled under moist oily skin. Her grip on the hilt was slick with sweat.

  The sea lion opened its mouth and roared and became something else. Alys didn’t know what it was, and didn’t want to know. Soft black hands flexed in the air as the thing gibbered and squealed.

  I can’t take much more of this, thought Alys. I wonder what happens if I do let go? She shut her eyes, clinging to the hope that the thing seemed to be getting weaker.

  The shuddering beneath her stopped. The sounds stopped too. Cautiously she unsquinted and looked down, fingers still clasped trembling-tight around the sword.

  It had turned into a giant frog-thing, with slack pebbled gray skin and bulbous, glazing yellow eyes. It was enormous, and smelled vile, but it was only moving feebly. It kicked once or twice and was still.

  On shaky legs, leaning her weight on the sword, Alys pushed herself up and looked it in the face. It was beyond moving any more.

  She let go of the sword and collapsed by it, her head in her hands. She ached all over. Janie crawled over from the cabinet until she was on the other side of the creature.

  She looked up and met Janie’s eyes across the frog. They were both breathing hard.

  “Is it dead?”

  “Yes. I—yes.”

  “Well,” said Janie. She swallowed once or twice, and blinked, eyes wide with shock. She looked at Alys, then at the frog, and then back again. Then she said, rather blankly:

  “You know, we don’t do enough of these sister type things together.”

  Alys clapped a hand over her mouth to stiffle the giggles, but they burst out wildly. Janie began to giggle, herself, hysterically, and they rocked and shook on opposite sides of the froggy corpse. It had begun to disintegrate into a pile of gray slush, a fact which did not surprise Alys in the least. The smell was indescribable.

  At last, gagging and choking, she wiped tears from her eyes, stumbled to her feet, and pulled her sword out of the mess. It took a good tug; the blade was imbedded in the floor. She wiped it on the throw rug in the corner.

  Janie’s giggles had died away to hiccups. She also got to her feet and stood looking down.

  “What—what was it, anyway?” panted Alys.

  “I’m still not sure,” Janie replied unsteadily. “Not a boo-jum, though, and definitely not a phantasm. A shape changer of some sort, with seven incarnations. S’weird.” She gave a shaky sigh and shook her head as if to clear the last remnants of mirth and hysteria.

  Then, with an exclamation, she suddenly bent down and plucked something out of the pile of muck. To Alys it looked like a thick circlet of silver with curious designs inscribed on the surface. Janie examined it, rolling it between her fingers. Then, just as suddenly, she dropped it, almost flinging it away, wiping her fingers on her jeans.

  “Alys, quick!” she cried. “As quick as you can, run and get Charles and Claudia down here. There isn’t any time to lose. And we’ll need other things—food and water—and a flashlight. Hurry!”

  Her demeanor had undergone a complete change. Her words ran together, tumbling over each other, her purple eyes flashed with urgency. Alys stared at her, totally lost.

  “I—what? What are you talking about? Where are you going?”

  “To get a hammer. And a nail, and some string. And chalk, white chalk. And we’ll need some blankets and things—anything you’d take into a fallout shelter. Go, go!”

  Alys was still flummoxed. She stood where she was, frowning.

  “We don’t have a fallout shelter.”

  “I didn’t say we did, I said those were the sort of things we need. Alys, don’t just stand there! Run!”

  “I want to know what’s happening—”

  “There isn’t any time. It may be too late already!”

  “To late for what? Janie, talk to me!”

  “Will you please just do as I say?”

  “Will you please just tell me what’s going on!”

  Janie’s expression, as she stood frozen in her flight to the hardware closet, said she was being goaded beyond endurance. “If I told you that it is four hundred miles to San Francisco, and that a break in numinous rapport could be felt over twice that distance, and that Mach three is a limit only for corporeal entities, would that help? Does that make things any clearer? Oh, Alys, for once will you please just trust me!”

  Alys wavered, bewildered and supremely frustrated. Abruptly she whirled and plunged up the stairs, seeing Janie turn back toward the closet the instant she obeyed.

  She was able to take out some of her frustration on Charles. She rousted him out of bed by the simple expedient of yanking all his covers off and snapping on the light.

  “Up! Now!”

  “What’re you doing? Leggo!” he shouted foggily, striking out.

  “Get up and get downstairs fast, Charles. Bring your blanket and pillow. Hurry!”

  She left him sitting bolt upright in bed, staring after her.

  With her younger sister she was more gentle. Claudia woke at the first touch of Alys’s hand on her shoulder, and sat up with wide eyes.

  “Is it a fire?”

  “No, but you’ve got to come quick. Bring your blanket and what you’ll need for the night.”

  Claudia gathered up her blanket. She lifted a threadbare Paddington from the dresser, hesitated, then thrust it back, seizing her pillow instead.

  Alys hustled her down the stairs. As they reached the bottom Charles appeared at the top, scowling, clad only in the bottom half of a pair of ancient seersucker pajamas. His hair was sticking straight up all over his head.

  When he had descended far enough to see the dining room he slowed. His mouth dropped open. His eyes moved from the dining table, which had been pushed aside so Janie could hammer a tenpenny nail into the parquet floor, to the shambles of the room, to the puddle of evil-smelling sludge left by the frog-thing.

  “Gee,” he said at last, almost reverently. It was as if only this epithet, by its very mildness, could express what he felt when other words failed. “Gee whiz, Janie,” he said again. “Is Mom ever going to be mad.”

  “Shut up and make yourself useful,” snapped Janie, hammering her finger and sounding in that instant exactly like Morgana.

  “Get
the earthquake kit, Charles,” said Alys, taking the hammer from Janie and driving the nail in with two swift, accurate blows. “And some food from the fridge.”

  “And something white I can pour. Granules. Not liquid.” Janie had tied a piece of chalk to one end of a long string; now she tied the other end of the string to the nail and stretched it out taut. Using the string as a compass, her tongue between her teeth in concentration, she began to draw a circle on the floor with the chalk.

  “I know what you’re doing,” said Charles, coming down the stairs with an air of dawning comprehension. “I saw it on TV. And what you need is salt.”

  “I don’t care if it’s salt or sand or flipping baby powder! It’s just got to be white!” Janie had finished the circle and was now making eight marks at equal intervals around it.

  Charles fetched a canister of salt while Alys shook Claudia’s pillow out of its case and began tumbling cans from the shelves into this makeshift bag. At her instructions Claudia ran to get candles and matches.

  “What else?” said Charles to Janie, who was carefully pouring a thin stream of salt over the perfect octagon she had drawn.

  “Get all the stuff inside—and be careful! Don’t break the lines.”

  “Charles may know what you’re doing,” Alys said, hanging grimly on to her patience as she slung supplies inside the circle, “but I don’t. Why—”

  “I’m pulling in the wards,” Janie said shortly. “With less area to protect they should be much denser, much stronger. That’s the theory, anyway. It’s not something I ever expected to try with a virtue wand.”

  “Ah, the magic back-scratcher,” said Charles.

  Janie spoke without looking up. “You’d just better hope it works. Because as the wards are now, they don’t stand a chance of holding up against—”

  “Against what?”

  “It’s ready. Step inside quick! We’ve only got minutes, if that.”

  Alys bit back further questions and lifted Claudia over the salt line. “All right, we’ve got everything—no, wait!” She jumped back out and ran across the room.

  Janie looked harried. “Alys, I’m not sure it’s a good idea—”

  “This sword stays with me! It was a good enough idea ten minutes ago!”

  Charles glanced back and forth between his two sisters uneasily. “Given,” he said, “the choice between the platinum-plus pigsticker and the magic back-scratcher—”

  The sisters instantly joined forces in commanding him to shut up. Alys plopped down cross-legged on the floor, pulling Claudia into her lap, dropping the sword by her side.

  “Matches!” said Janie, holding out her hand and clearly dissociating herself from the whole sword question.

  Charles slapped a pack in her hand. “Matches! But salt won’t burn!” he added, just as crisply.

  But this salt did, at the touch of a match. Janie crouched, black hair hanging in her eyes, to bury the tip of the rowan wand into one of the vertices she had marked. Low blue flames sprang up and flickered coldly. Claudia reached out tentatively to touch them and Alys snatched her hand back. Janie began breathing faster and a sheen of sweat appeared on her face. She shut her eyes.

  The wand began to vibrate and Janie seemed to be having trouble holding on to it. The windows and sliding glass doors rattled suddenly, as if struck by a howling wind. Janie scooted back, still keeping the end of the wand in the flames, and reached straight up in the air with one hand. Her fingers crooked in a beckoning motion. Charles leaned back to give her room: it was rather crowded in the circle.

  From everywhere, seemingly from the house itself, there rose a sound that was not really a sound. It was more a feeling of pressure that cut out all other noise. Over it, Janie was speaking words, no longer whispering but shouting, her head falling back. But as the spell rose to a crescendo her eyes focused on something beyond Alys and her voice turned shrill.

  “Ensha’am—Irridiadore—Charles, sit up! Alys, get him!”

  In backing away from Janie, Charles had come to the edge of the circle and was now sprawling with one hand outside it, supporting him. Alys seized her brother by the shoulder and pulled.

  As he came flying toward her there was another non-sound: a deafening, slamming pressure. Every light in the house went out and a blast of wind shot straight upward, blowing Alys’s hair toward the ceiling, drowning her scream. All around, where the circle of salt had burned with such flickering light, a painful violet brilliance erupted toward the sky.

  And then there was silence.

  Alys slowly lowered her hands from her ears. A fold of blanket had fallen across the salt line when she grabbed Charles. She picked it up and saw that the edge that had overlapped the circle was gone; cut as cleanly as if with a laser.

  “This could have been your arm!” she shouted at Charles, waving the blanket in his face.

  Janie, letting the virtue wand drop at last, slumped over with a sigh. Claudia said, “Ow,” in a small voice and picked herself up off the sword.

  Alys, too agitated to lecture Charles anymore, threw the blanket at him and looked around.

  They were sitting in an octagonal cylinder of violet light. It was almost the blue color of the bottom of a gas flame. Yet it didn’t look like flame, and not exactly like water, either, though it struck Alys as a bit like being in an upside-down waterfall. Because the waves of light were going upward, going fast, so fast they drew the eye with them, making it almost impossible to focus on anything outside. It made Alys’s head reel to look at it.

  It seemed to go right through the ceiling. Alys tore her gaze away and asked Janie, “How high?”

  “Thirty leagues, I think. The top anchor point is well into the stratosphere anyway.” Janie’s voice was quenched. “It must have knocked the power out for blocks,” she added.

  Alys held a hand near the violet jet stream. She felt a faint rush of cool air against her fingers.

  “It’s all right to touch it from this side,” said Janie. “But if anything from the other side tries—” She broke off, stiffening, peering through the circle. “Hang on, everybody. I think we’re just about to get a firsthand demonstration.”

  TEN

  Outside the Wards

  A silence had descended over the house. It was hard to see out through the blue cylinder, but Alys could detect nothing moving. She realized she was holding her breath.

  And then she saw it, a liquid flowing movement at the edge of her vision. It rippled almost like an eel, and it was easier to see, with her peripheral vision than when she looked at it directly. Claudia stirred in her lap and made a faint sound, pointing, and Alys caught a glimpse of another. Soon the darkened room was full of them, moving like whispers in a quiet church, rippling like silk.

  One, soaring effortlessly like a gull riding an updraft, circled the cylinder, going round and round until it disappeared through the ceiling where the cylinder did. The wood and plaster did not deter it noticeably.

  Another followed it, and another, and another. Soon the cylinder was encircled by them, following exactly in one another’s path, spiraling upward.

  “Now those,” said Janie authoritatively, and with some satisfaction, “are boojums.”

  Charles looked at her. “Is this something I want to know?”

  “They’re sprites. Like—like elementals, sort of—”

  “Oh, no.” said Alys in protest. These ghostly fliers were nothing like the elementals she remembered, the gentle guardians of the Wildworld marshlands. Even Elwyn’s wild girls, the wood sprites, had at least looked human.

  “Just sort of,” said Janie. “Elementals are natural, they’re born from the earth or the water or the woods. And they’re usually benevolent—at least if there aren’t any Quislais around to rile them. They watch over the land; they’re part of the natural order.

  “But boojums are made. Made by sorcery. And once you make ‘em, you own ‘em. They obey you. You can conjure them up from just about anything you like, but they fall
into five basic classes: earth, air, fire, water, and illusion. Those things”—with a gesture outside the circle—“are air boojums.”

  Alys shuddered, hating the silky menace of them.

  “I bet we’ll see some other varieties as the night goes on,” Janie added with a sort of gloomy relish. “Don’t know what they’ll do, though.”

  “Do you know where they come from?”

  “Of course,” Janie began scornfully, then she tensed, her attention caught by something outside the circle.

  Alys caught her breath, squinting through the veil of blue light. She herself could see nothing, but she could feel. Tiny vibrations communicated themselves from the floor to her hand.

  “Another quake?” Charles whispered.

  Janie shook her head. “There. Watch.”

  The vibrations were stronger, and Alys fancied she heard a sound, like the rumble of far-distant thunder. The parquet floor outside the circle was rising, swelling; boards snapping and falling aside. The mound rose to a height of perhaps seven or eight feet, then it quivered and split at the top. A great clay-colored slug forced itself out of the crown, shaking off crumbs of earth. It began to hump its way down the dome. Others followed.

  “Earth boojums,” supplied Janie.

  Outside, the wind screamed—and it really did scream, unless, as seemed more likely to Alys, it wasn’t the wind at all. She peered through the eerie blue light to make out an eerie red light in the backyard. It seemed to rise and fall like the image of a flame.

  She looked at Janie. “Fire boojums?”

  Janie nodded, still looking half-appalled and half as if she would like to whip out a loose-leaf binder and start taking notes. “The backyard must be full of them—and who knows what else. I pity any stray cats out there tonight.”

  Alys and Charles agreed, and Claudia’s feelings, of course, were in no doubt. But the next minute Claudia was clutching Alys by the arm, almost shrieking, too upset even to form a sentence.

  “Alys!” she gasped out. “Benjamin Bunny! Benjamin Bunny! Oh, Alys, Benjamin Bunny!” She threw herself facedown in Alys’s lap, sobbing hysterically.