Three Stories About Ghosts

  “It’s an armoury for the Massachusetts Colonial Coven Militia,” he answered as he took down two large chestnut branches from the wall.

  “I see,” Agatha said, her mouth agape as she looked around. “But what’s it doing here?”

  John shrugged. “As good a place to hide it as any. My house serves as a fortress in a defensive war.”

  John looked back and followed Agatha’s gaze to the room’s far end. At the back, behind a stack of canister crates, a smooth oak tree trunk sat suspended on a bed of glowing mana vapour.

  “Is that—” Agatha tried to ask.

  “Mark 33 Trebuchet. Weapon of war,” he said. “We can’t carry it.”

  Agatha nodded slowly as she made her way over to the opposite wall and started testing out lengths of wood, packing wand after wand and canister after canister into the folds of her robes.

  John looked down at his suit. He desperately wanted to change, to wash, to shave: he didn’t want to meet what could be his end like this, but they lacked any time. He shrugged and packed himself with as many weapons and canisters as he could carry.

  “Ready?” he asked as he turned back to Agatha. Above them, he heard the rumble and thunder of a form materialising.

  She nodded and led the way back up into the house. Out of the shattered living room window, they saw Castle Bellard seep out of mist and hover above their front lawn. Eleven hundred years old, and packed to the teeth with the most modern weapons they had yet devised.

  “Actually, I’ll grab those trebuchets,” he said. “They’ll look great on Bellard’s battlements.”

  Chapter Seven

  CASTLE BELLARD MATERIALISED over the summit’s tourist vista point; all wards raised threefold. The sudden change in temperature and the stomach lurch from the castle’s outdated self-apparture made John almost heave up the handful of strawberries and cherries he’d eaten at the café while waiting for Dean Walters.

  As he stood at the castle’s crennellations and looked down, his breath caught. It seemed all the peoples of the world were gathered there. He swallowed hard and held onto the stone walls as the castle leaned forward and drifted down to join the formation of the Sky Mother’s forces.

  Dozens of craft were gathered, forming three interlocking circles over the summit of Mauna Loa. He counted two dozen tribal totems, the stark stone tower of the American Wardens with the Grand Master’s colours flying from its top, and several minor towers bearing either totemic emblems or colonial coven markings. He swelled with pride at the forces gathered from the Americas, but trembled at the same time as he scanned the rest of the craft, representing every power he could imagine.

  The twelve-spired gothic castle of Knight-Captain Gustav of the Hexé Krieg floated on its mist of mana next to Grand Jenny, a colossal pirate ship on which the Greek Seirenes still lived. Three Egyptian and two Maya pyramids clustered together, and the sandstone citadels of Sindhustan interlocked with the cream-hued stone colleges of Oxford. Around them, thousands of magi floated on brooms, plumes, carpets—even one armchair, next to a Mongolian yurt.

  On the ground below, chaos had broken loose. Arcs of power flashed in all directions and different hues. Here and there, spurts of flame shot out as land forces engaged, and even at this distance, the roar of wands and cries of battle were clear.

  “Never thought I’d see war like this again,” Laird Bellard said as he joined him on the battlements. His men had finished loading the last of the trebuchets alongside his own weapons. John looked over to find the Laird’s eyes locked on the fight below, his jaw clenched into a grim vice.

  “Are we ready?” he shouted.

  The other forces seemed poised, but hesitant, even as magi fought and died beneath them. At the heart of the three circles, Nafarin’s ward rose from the summit of the volcano like a half-sphere of blood. John couldn’t make out anything happening within it, and no one seemed willing to take the first shot.

  “To hell with them,” Laird Bellard shouted, scowling. “Break formation, bring us right above the ward.”

  Behind them, a young officer twisted and pulled on the great bronze levers set into the battlements, and the stone shook under John’s feet as the castle deftly skirted a domed Ashbal castle and tilted over Nafarin’s ward. John looked around once more to see if Anton and the Hungarians were here, but he couldn’t see them. He made out a few blue-robed figures of the Frankish Confederacy, fighting against the Sky Mother’s soldiers in the hundred different skirmishes raging around the ward’s outer perimeter far below.

  “Well?” Bellard shouted, elevating his voice to carry for miles in all directions. “Someone shoot something.”

  “Shoot what, my Laird?” a warrior asked from the wall below as Agatha flew up to join them.

  “The ward, idiot!” Bellard shouted back. “Loose everything we have!”

  Castle Bellard loosed the first major spell of the battle. Three of the Mk. 33 Trebuchets opened up, casting a tendril of neon blue power each into a ball and sending them down onto Nafarin’s ward in a solid line of power that scratched across its outer face for three seconds. The ward didn’t so much as wobble.

  The hesitation still held for a moment, but in seconds the air filled with the hum and reverberation of dozens of different spells of war, causing sudden waves of nausea to buffet him, and chaos the likes of which he’d never seen erupted all around him.

  Wave after wave of power crashed against Nafarin’s wards, and though strands of it broke loose here and there, it held.

  “Fuck!” Bellard shouted as he studied the ward. “That bastard’s tough, John. We’ll not make it through in time.”

  John glanced over at Agatha, still sat on her broom above the castle’s tower. She beckoned him over. He squeezed Laird Bellard’s shoulder and leapt up onto Agatha’s broom behind her, trying to bind himself as tightly as he could to the broom and avoid smashing his face into the two branches strapped to Agatha’s back.

  “Hold on,” she shouted as she dove headfirst towards the ground, weaving through arcs of power that would vaporise them in an instant. She headed towards a smaller exchange at the edge of the ground skirmish, where he made out the form of Grand Master Caohopa leading an attack on a group of Polish Hussars guarding a depot of crates.

  All John could do was hold on and keep his wards raised as Agatha danced her way through withering enemy blasts, and John shook as two of them found their way to crash against his ward.

  “Keep it steady,” Agatha shouted as she leaned forward and dove faster.

  John drained two more canisters into his wards. As they approached, Agatha let go of the broomstick with her right hand, drew a minor wand from her robe, and lanced a Hussar straight through the heart.

  He barely had time to marvel at her accuracy before the soldiers below them saw her, spun, and loosed streams of power straight towards them. She spun, dipped and dashed forward towards her fellow wardens, but before she could reach the safety of the Grand Master’s wards, a spell glanced off her broom’s tail, immediately bursting the thing into flames, and sending them both hurtling to the floor.

  John staggered from the impact on the broomstick, tried to shake his head clear, and scrambled to right himself as he fished a feather from his pocket. The ground reared up from the corner of his eyes, but he suddenly felt cushioned and slowed, and he reached the ground to find Trish standing there, controlling his and Agatha’s falls.

  “What took you so long?” she shouted over the ear-splitting ruckus of the battle raging around them. She didn’t wait for their answer but led the way straight to the ward’s outer edge. John looked around for any sign of the soldiers who had shot them down, but they were turned away, still engaging the wardens. He didn’t blame them. That fall should have killed them both—and would have, if not for Trish.

  She now wore her Magistra war robes, a tight-fitting black and gold robe with platinum metal accents at the wrists and neck. She didn’t carry any weapon that he could see, but her hands
hummed with power. His mind screamed that this wasn’t possible, but he didn’t question it. Tamokameses, as he recalled, didn’t use a wand either. Agatha ran with the alacrity of a woman a third her age and joined them as they sprinted across bare volcanic rock towards Nafarin’s ward.

  As they neared, the ground bucked beneath their feet and John stumbled and nearly fell. The power from the gathered forces above them was near constant, and the ward’s fibres were breaking one at a time, sending power to ripple along the stone. He struggled forward, trying to keep pace with Trish, but as they neared, he felt eyes on him.

  One of his two main branches had snapped, but he drew the other and raised a fresh ward as he ran. He glanced around, but every soldier there was engaged in battle. It seemed no one had seen them land here, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched again. He tried to force his mind to focus on the task ahead.

  The ward’s outer perimeter was a swirling mass of crimson. Power flowed in all directions and set his mind spinning. He steadied himself, turned around to make sure they weren’t followed, and as he reached for a bottle of scholin weed, he realised with a start that he hadn’t drunk any since leaving the former site of the world engine.

  “Mum!” Trish called.

  John turned and dropped the bottle to shatter on the ground as he saw a small hole in the ward, with Trish’s hands on either side of it.

  “John, Mum, come on!” she whispered.

  John had a hundred different questions, but he didn’t waste any time on them here. He ran forward, bent down, checked to see his wands and canisters were in place and crawled through the chest-high hole Trish had opened. As they both followed him through, he raised an eyebrow at Trish.

  “You can open holes?”

  Trish nodded but gestured up. John followed her gaze. The ward, hundreds of feet above their heads at its tallest point, periodically rippled under the assault.

  “The attack’s matching the total power expended at Damavand every few seconds, John. They’re going all out up there.”

  John gasped as he tried to wrap his mind around the numbers.

  “I don’t know how much power is in me, John. That hole though was about as large as I could make it, and there’s no time to call for help.”

  John didn’t question it. He nodded to Agatha as they both drew their main battle branch, reinforced their wards, and strode towards the cultist camp at the volcano’s summit. He started to get anxious at the ease with which they were advancing, surrounded by Frankish and Polish soldiers on all sides, with a few Hungarians and Americans scattered here and there, but no one so much as looked towards them.

  The camp was a hellscape. They’d drawn magma out of the active volcano, and all around them, it crawled in streams. They’d erected metal bridges and platforms over them, and a central stage hung over a deep precipice from which molten rock continually spat.

  “Our Sky Mother is almost suffocated,” Trish said as she pointed to the central stage, “but Nafarin has the world engine. He hangs over it like a poison mist, ready to infect and kill Her the moment She can’t hold any longer and draws breath.”

  John’s heart shuddered. The idea that the Star Mother was mortal seemed as strange to him as his dead wife standing here before him in all her fierce beauty. He swallowed, scanned around for a place to strike from, and froze as he saw young Kate Hart, stripped naked and bound in chains inside a cage hanging over the rift. Her cage spun slowly, and her face looked devoid of any hope.

  “When She draws breath,” Trish continued, “they’ll throw Kate in as the virgin sacrifice, enact the rites, and bring their vile lord into being.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Agatha said, stalking forward.

  John went to follow her, then turned and reinforced his wards by instinct as an arc of power crashed into it. He loosed a return blast from his branch—it splattered off a Frankish soldier’s ward—and dove for cover. A storm of magic enveloped them within moments; repeated blasts stripped his ward, and three shackles snaked their way around Trish’s feet and bound her to the ground. He looked around to find the source of the shackles, found a Frankish soldier holding them, raised his wand and lanced her through the heart, but even as she fell, three more spirit shackles curled around Trish. How could they know that she was a spirit? He cursed himself for ignoring his instincts that he was being watched.

  A soldier tried to lash him, but the binding passed through his living flesh, and he emptied a full wand against the soldier’s ward. But before he could draw another wand, three full branches of power were pointed at his head. He glanced over to find Trish bound and Agatha sprawled on the floor, looking up with her hands empty at two charged branches pointed at her head.

  John swallowed hard. He wanted to reach for another wand, but he’d be dead before his hand moved half way. He looked to Trish again, to find her shooting him a strange look of urgency and a wry smile. He raised his hands in surrender and didn’t resist as they disarmed him, bound his hands, and poked him in the back with their branches as they led him forward to the stage.

  For the first time since standing at the bell tower of Preston College, looking out into the trees for some phantom threat, he realised what had been watching him. A group of men huddled on what looked to be a command post in the network of metal bridges and platforms crisscrossing the volcano. He recognised Etienne Louis, Leon Grupa, Maurius Duma, Dean Walters, and a man made of stone. The stone man turned to him. He was of solid black stone, maybe obsidian or basalt, stood seven feet tall, and had black eyes. He had a smooth head and no adornments or accents in colour.

  John’s steps faltered, and the soldier behind him jabbed his branch into his back, sending him to lurch forward and fall in front of the stone man. John recognised the shape of his face in a moment, but found his heart unable to grieve at yet another betrayal. The world had already turned upside down for him.

  “So you found how to use their technology, Professor?”

  Trish writhed and struggled so hard that she seemed to actually break one or two of her bindings, but Professor Goodland smiled and waved her away. John felt Trish’s pain, her raw struggle, but found he didn’t share her anger. He was calm. He looked around and found only lost souls; he pitied them. They sacrificed sanity for meagre scraps of power. He dropped and shook his head. If this was to be his end—indeed, the end of life as this world knew it—he’d be damned if he would meet it in anger.

  “She’s made of pure power from the Sky Mother,” Professor Goodland said in a similar metallic voice to Tamokameses, but with the professor’s distinctive highland accent. “Take her to the feeding chamber and bind her to a stack; she’ll be a good meal for our Lord when He emerges.”

  My wife, John thought. He studied her, the scratch from her play fight with Lizzie still on her right cheek, and tried to drink in the sight of her.

  Maurius Duma stepped forward, but Professor Goodland raised his stone arm to bar his way.

  “Not you,” he hissed, “you couldn’t even hold a tower for me, imbecile. Etienne?” He turned to return to a flashing computer terminal, and Maurius stepped back chagrined.

  Good, John thought. At least Anton had triumphed.

  “The other two?” Etienne Louis asked, stepping forward to take Trish’s bindings.

  “Let them watch, then kill them.”

  With that, they were dismissed. He knew now that Professor Goodland had watched him, hidden in shadows and darkness. The one thing he couldn’t figure out was why. The professor had always been a good man, but, as his father had once said, the lure of Nafarin levels humanity, afflicting king and beggar, pious and pagan alike.

  Etienne Louis and two of his guards led them into a makeshift building made of empty crates up against the volcano’s crevice. As Trish was lashed to a stake up against the edge of a river of magma, ready to be consumed when Nafarin emerged, John and Agatha were roped to two crates on the ground behind her.

  Trish hadn’t
stopped fighting this entire time. She was bound with her back to them, but was still trying to break free through sheer force of will. Etienne posted two guards, an older man and a tall woman to watch them, reinforced the shackles on Trish, checked first Agatha’s and then his bonds, and left the ‘feeding chamber,’ heading back towards the command post.

  Agatha looked around her with her customary coiled anger, and Trish continued struggling to break free. John felt that he should struggle too, but found he couldn’t.

  He drew in a lungful of the acrid, sulphurous air, tried to hold it despite it burning his throat, and released it. He thought back to a poem he’d read when they’d run off to Scotland together. Its title was lost to the shadows of his memory, but that evening, alone with Trish for the first time, a bottle of wine, a book of verse, lobsters, samphire, and boiled potatoes in butter sauce played clear as day in his mind. The warmth of the memory soothed him.

  “Trish,” he called, “tell me of love. My heart remains forever young within you.”

  She relaxed in an instant and sagged into her bindings, and John’s heart cracked anew as he saw her shoulders shake.

  He couldn’t help the tears that welled up in his own eyes, but he forced them away. Now was not the time for sadness. He didn’t notice at first, but Agatha wasn’t to his left any more. He turned to find her holding a wand the size of a toothpick in her right hand and grabbing the female Frankish guard’s fully charged branch with her left. Before the other guard could react, she slapped the toothpick into her face; her head shattered in a haze of blood and brains.

  The second guard spun, and Agatha slammed her hand against his throat to stifle his warning. He jumped back to make enough space to level his branch, but Agatha followed him, lowered her shoulder and charged, knocking him into the lava. She fell to her knees on the edge of the rift herself. Her left hand had been burnt to a crisp by the first guard’s wand.