Heart of Valor - V1 Dec 2004

by Lisa Jane Smith

  The older Hodges-Bradleys exchanged dismayed glances. At last Charles, looking acutely uncomfortable, cleared his throat, and Alys knew without question that he was about to launch upon an explanation to Claudia about where the good bunnies go. Alys shook her head, forestalling him, then looked at Janie.

  “Is there,” she said, “any way out of this thing?”

  Janie’s expression snapped shut like a steel trap. “You,” she said briefly, “are looped.”

  “Yes. Okay. But is there a way out?”

  “No!”

  “Think, Janie. How can you let me out and leave the three of you inside? Stop shaking your head at me. There must be a theory, anyway.”

  Janie stopped shaking her head and turned her back. Several minutes later she spoke coldly over her shoulder.

  “I could take down an anchor point and make a rent in the wards. Theoretically, I ought to be able to hold it open for a little while, without the whole structure’s collapsing.”

  “Good girl.” Now that it came to it, Alys was not sure if she were glad or horrified that there was a way. Determinedly, she transferred Claudia to Charles, who was regarding her with wary disbelief, and, rising, she picked up the sword.

  “Alys,” said Janie, “you have always been bossy and a little weird. But just lately—and I really think you might want to think about this—”

  “Just do it, will you?”

  “—because Morgana is not going to be exactly overjoyed to hear that I violated the wards, overstepped my station, and risked all four of our lives for the sake of a barbecued bunny rabbit! Sorry, Claudia.”

  Alys rubbed the flat of the sword on her sleeve. The blue light flowed over it until she seemed to be holding a blade made of water. “Please hurry,” she said softly.

  Janie’s sigh indicated that she had been pushed past the limits of human endurance. She began scanning various parts of the cylinder, all of which looked exactly the same to Alys. Finally she leaned forward and placed the virtue wand vertically against the wall. She muttered some words and slowly began to drag the top of the stick around, like turning a clock’s hand from twelve to six. Behind the stick a clear space opened in the violet curtain; a half circle.

  “One thing,” she said with precision and between her teeth as Alys stepped forward. “This rent is not stable. I can keep it open for, maybe, a quarter of an hour, and then it shuts and it shuts for good. I do not have the power to do this again. So you get back here in twelve minutes even if it means bunny brochette, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Alys, a little shakily, and she stepped through the opening.

  *

  The backyard had been transformed. It wasn’t merely the strange illumination, red and orange and gold, which shone from all around like a thousand candles; familiar shapes had been masked and covered, distorted. Another of the large mounds stood in front of her, naked rock thrusting up through the grass, a broken sprinkler head dangling incongruously from its side. Transparent orange icicles hung from the eaves of the porch, trembling slightly and pulsing with light as she passed. Silky eels blanketed the patio furniture. The clay-colored slugs gave way as she approached. One didn’t move quickly enough and she prodded it with the sword; it hissed and withdrew. But when she glanced behind she saw that they were following, closing in. Above the flickering orange light the second story of the house loomed dark against the cloudy sky. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed that the violet cylinder was spun out to the consistency of a fine mist above the roof. No one was going to report a UFO sighting or come to lend aid.

  There was a black pool on the far side of the mound, between her and the rabbit hutch. To her cringing bare feet the water was cold, and the bottom seemed lined with smooth round pebbles. She was halfway across when she saw bubbles, a thin line like an electron trail in a cloud chamber, headed straight for her. She shied and stabbed at once, catching a glimpse of something streamlined and silvery that broke the water in an achingly lovely curve before it fell back from the sword. She didn’t need Janie to tell her what it was.

  Air, earth, fire, and water. She’d seen them all, now. There were slugs clinging to the sides of the rabbit hutch, icicles festooning the roof, and silkies on top. They pulsed quietly and seemed to be watching her, although they were all completely eyeless as far as she could tell.

  She began dispatching them one by one, flipping the slugs off, slashing the trembling icicles, prodding the silkies into flight. It was almost too easy. She opened the cage door to see the white shape of Benjamin, rigid with terror but apparently still breathing.

  She reached in and he shied away, gazing at her with fixed red eyes. When she took him by the skin at the back of the neck he struggled wildly for an instant, then went still. She tucked him under her free arm and started back.

  Almost too easy. Although the slugs still followed her, almost on her heels, they stopped when she showed them the sword. A cautious triumph swelled in her. She was past the mound and in sight of the sliding door when she heard it.

  “Ssssssss …”

  Faint and dry as a dead leaf chased down the sidewalk by a brief wind. But she recognized it. Shocked, she turned.

  The Feathered Serpents of the Wildworld were creatures of awesome power and majesty; vast, armored, almost indestructible. But not as babies. This serpent was only half a millenium old and still blue and coral instead of stark red and black. It was barely as long as her arm. She remembered the first time she had seen it, perishing from heat in a golden cage near the fire where Cadal Forge had put it. Then, it had barely been able to summon up the strength to talk to her. Now, nestled in the earth of a potted shrub, six pairs of wings limp and open instead of folded in a sleek ridge down its back, it seemed to have even less.

  “Ssssssss …” The beadlike black eyes looked at hers pleadingly.

  Hesitantly, she stepped toward it. How could it be here? Her serpent, which had been shut on the other side of the Passage when Morgana broke the mirrors.

  But the Passage had opened again, if only for a second. And it had always loved her, always trusted her.

  The black eyes shone dully in the red light.

  “Sssssssss …”

  Helplessly, she reached down to touch it.

  ELEVEN

  Besieged

  “It worries me,” Charles was saying to Janie. “Do you understand what I mean? Not just right now. But everything lately—and sometimes she doesn’t even seem like Alys anymore,” he finished incoherently. “Do you know what I mean?” he demanded.

  “All I know is she’s only got five and a half minutes left,” said Janie tensely, eyes on the grandfather clock in the corner.

  A minute passed. Two.

  “She’s not going to make it,” said Charles. He stood, looking pale in that eerie light. “Okay. Now.”

  “And fight them with what?” burst out Janie, understanding him perfectly. “Jujitsu? Tae kwon do? The Force?”

  She was almost shrieking by the last words. Charles looked around the cylinder and picked up the canister of salt. He flapped a hand vaguely at her, in admonition or farewell, and climbed through the rent.

  “Three minutes!” snarled Janie, sticking her head out after him. “Three minutes and I hope you both get fricasseed out there.” If it hadn’t been Janie he would have thought she was on the verge of tears.

  *

  Alys was kneeling before the urn, the serpent wrapped around both her wrists. Except that it wasn’t the serpent, of course, it was some wire-tough appendage of the creature, which had chosen for the moment to look like a potted plant.

  “Stupid, stupid,” she told herself. Air, earth, fire, and water she had remembered. She had forgotten illusion.

  The thing which had caught her wrists in a grip like steel cable under oilskin hadn’t done anything to hurt her. It simply held her. But from all sides the others were closing in.

  She kicked the closest slug away and felt a caress like chiffon on her shoulde
rs. She shrugged violently, more offended by the silky eels than by any of the others. More than ten minutes have passed, she thought.

  She felt another gentle touch on her back, on her arms, followed by a prickling like pins and needles. It wasn’t painful. She made up her mind not to scream, and drew a breath. Then rough hands were tearing at her shoulders and neck and she heard cloth give way.

  “Be quiet! Be quiet! I’m getting them off!” Charles shouted.

  “Get the sword!” she shouted back, seizing precarious hold of herself. “Will you just get the sword and get me loose?”

  He winced as he picked the sword up. The first awkward, overhand blow simply bounced off the blue and coral cable.

  “Not there, you’re going to cut off my hands! This whole thing is alive! Stab right in the middle, right down into the pot!”

  He positioned the sword and leaned on it hard, driving the blade into ornamental gravel—or what looked like orna mental gravel. With a grunt he threw his weight on it and the sword sank deep. The serpent-cable whisked off Alys’s wrists, giving her a first-class rope burn, and was snatched down inside.

  She put her numb hands on his, which were damp and cold, and helped him wrench the sword out. Then she turned. Between them and the door was an army of slugs, layer on clay-colored layer. Eels drifted thick as smoke in the red air.

  “They don’t like salt—the slug ones,” gasped Charles.

  “C’mon!”

  Alys wanted to make a plan, to have Charles protect the rabbit while she went ahead with the sword. But what actually happened was that a phalanx of eels swooped in; she seized the rabbit by the loose skin on the back of its neck, and the next thing she knew she was pounding toward the house, with Charles brandishing the sword and yelling, “Run, Bambi, run!” madly in her ears.

  The opening in the cylinder was no longer a half circle but a triangular wedge like a piece of pizza, and was rapidly getting thinner. She found Charles’s dirty bare feet waving in her face as he dived through and then hands were reaching to take Benjamin and help her.

  “Pull! Pull!” she shouted.

  Her hips stuck. With one agonizing wriggle they came free and she went crashing down inside. Falling, of course, on Charles.

  She scrambled up, promising herself to feel the bruises later. The virtue wand traversed the last few inches to twelve o’clock, knitting the wards up behind it.

  Charles remained lying on his back, eyes shut. “Are we dead yet?” he inquired.

  Alys looked at him wildly. His naked chest was streaked with enough mud to qualify him as an ancient Briton if only it had been blue instead of ochre, and his hair stuck straight up all over his head. Elwyn’s witch mark gleamed faintly on his forehead.

  She knelt beside him. He immediately opened one eye and hunched rapidly away without rising.

  “No kissing! No kissing!”

  “Okay. All right.” She looked at Janie, who had collapsed in a tangle of black hair, and at Claudia, who was regarding her with precisely the same expression Benjamin had had when she first opened the hutch. She looked back at her brother. “Charles.”

  “Look,” said Charles, sitting up at last, “will you just give the girl her rabbit?”

  *

  When Charles and Claudia were asleep Janie and Alys sat and looked through the wall of coruscating blue. They spoke in low voices; there was a lull in the activity outside and stillness blanketed the house.

  “I think it’s time,” said Alys, “to tell me exactly what’s going on.”

  “I should’ve imagined that would be obvious,” Janie whispered back. “We’re beseiged. We’re under sorcerous attack. By Thia Pendriel, I presume.”

  “Great reasoning, Mycroft. I’d gotten that far myself. But ‘why are we under attack?”

  “Because that frog-thing you killed, that shape shifter with the seven incarnations, was hers. Her familiar.”

  “Like the vixen?”

  Janie’s lips drew back in distaste. “In a way. Some sorcerei don’t keep a regular familiar, like Morgana keeps the vixen. Whenever they need one they pick up some nearby animal and use it. And when it’s used up …” Janie shrugged and opened her hands expressively. “I figure she took some ordinary animal and changed it. Because that frog-thing was altered, it was made into a shape shifter, and made for one purpose: to get us. Even so, it must have taken a lot of work, and there was a bond between them. When it was killed she must have felt it. And I bet she was furious! When I realized that I figured the first thing she would do would be to send a gaggle of the nastiest boojums she could conjure up to teach us a lesson.”

  “But why?” Alys persisted. “Why send a familiar to harass us in the first place? We’re nothing to her. Unless it’s just spite—”

  Janie gave a tired laugh. “Hardly. Alys, she’s smart! She knows about us, knows how we know Morgana. And if she puts us in enough danger …”

  Alys’s stomach clenched. “She just might distract Morgana from whatever’s going on up there.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Which means we’ve got to stick it out as long as we can, so that Morgana can get her business finished first.”

  “Yes. The problem is, I don’t know how long we can stick it out. Ordinary boojums have a very short life span. But Thia Pendriel’s got not only a Silver Staff but a Gem of Power, and for all I know these things are planning to camp out until next Beltane.”

  Alys rested her head on her knees. They had food and water for a week, if that. Not to mention sanitary arrangements. “Janie,” she said after a moment, “what are they, anyway? The Gems of Power?”

  Janie gave her a narrow glance. “You shouldn’t even know about them,” she said. Then she shrugged. “All right, but you can’t tell anybody else, okay?”

  “Who,” said Alys hollowly, “would believe me if I did tell?”

  Janie grinned. “Right. Well, the Gems of Power are called the has imdril, the Forgotten Gems, because they’ve been lost to the Wildworld for a long time. There were twelve once, but most of them disappeared ages ago. The Council has three in their stronghold at Weerien, but they’re never used, never even touched.”

  “But what are they?”

  Janie sighed and settled her chin on her knees. She put on her guest-speaker expression.

  “A long time ago,” she said, “there was the Golden Age of Findahl, all right? The dawn of the Wildworld. And in that time lived the greatest sorcerer the Wildworld has ever known.”

  “Darion—”

  “—Beldar. Yes. Do you mind? Darion the Falcrister, he was called, the Nightweaver, creator of the Black Staff. He made it and it was more powerful than all the other staffs put together. So, guess what? He got to be King.

  “Only he was a good guy, and so it worked out okay. The Wildworld was different itself, then. It was unspoiled and, and—new, sort of, and the sorcerei were only just discovering how to use magic wherever they found it. The councillors were good, and Darion was good, and everybody sang a lot, and learned a lot, and made things, and was happy. That’s what they say.

  “But it had to end, finally. Darion lived a long time, but at last he knew he was dying. And he realized that he couldn’t just pass the Black Staff along to somebody else. It was too powerful. There was no one he could trust to wield it and not be corrupted.

  “So he Unmade it. No one knows how. And what was left when he was done were Twelve Gems of Power, each containing a twelfth of the power of the original staff. That was when the Council of Twelve became the Ruling Council.

  “But even the Gems were too strong, or else something had gone wrong when Darion Unmade the staff. A lot of people think that the Gems were changed or distorted when he did it, and that accounts for the weird things that happened afterward. Because weird things did happen to the councillors who held them. Three of them went mad and rebelled and tried to seize all the rest of the stones. And of course, the other councillors, the faithful ones, resisted.

  “So th
ere was a war. The Thousand Years’ War. A lot of the Wildfolk were killed. Because in a sorcerous war everybody can participate. For a long time it looked like the rebels were going to win, and when they were finally conquered not one of the original faithful councillors was left alive, and all their Gems were lost. But there was peace at last.

  “The new councillors—there were only nine from then on—tried to rebuild. But they never really had a chance. For one thing, they only had staffs to work with, because the three Gems that were left—the rebels’ Gems—were locked away in the keeping of the Feathered Serpents. Nobody trusted anybody to touch them. And for another thing the Chaotic Zones had already started erupting. Suddenly there were Zones appearing all over and anybody caught inside them either died or went crazy. The Wildfolk had to abandon most of their old cities, and the little knowledge or art that had survived the war was destroyed in the Time of Chaos.”

  “The Chaotic Zones,” murmured Alys, remembering the desolation she had seen left when the tide of Chaos in one receded for a while. It had turned a green marshland teeming with life into a desert of gray mud. And when the wild magic surged up again from its source it might do anything—from erecting a glacier to constructing crippled life out of the mud itself. The Chaos obeyed no law. Within its boundaries, all bets were off.

  “That’s the problem the sorcerei have been faced with ever since,” said Janie. “Because every year there are more Chaotic Zones, and they get bigger. Everyone says they’re worried about it, but so far nobody has come up with a practical solution.”

  “Cadal Forge had a solution,” said Alys dryly, remembering.

  “Taking our world. Yes. Well, in a way you can hardly blame him. We’re just animals to the sorcerei. At least we’re lucky that the Council thinks we’re wild animals, and wants nothing to do with us. That’s why Morgana’s safe here even if Thia Pendriel does get the Passage back open. Because no matter how angry the Council is with Morgana over all the trouble she caused in the old days, they won’t come into this world after her. It’s their own law, and they’ll keep it. Separation of humans and Wildfolk forever.”