She made no move to do so. ‘Lovely,’ she said, regarding me with narrowed eyes. ‘But what a pity that the artefact no longer exists.’
‘Isn’t it?’ I agreed. If she imagined we were hiding the thing from her, well, that was a species of red herring. Perhaps it would keep her too busy to think of inspecting the scroll.
‘Well!’ said Fenella, turning to smile brightly at Alban, Emellana and Miranda. ‘It appears we are finished here.’ She inclined her head to them, apparently in respect, and something changed. Emellana sat up, blinking, and Alban straightened.
Miranda bolted, straight for the door. Alban and Em followed. Once all my friends were safely on my side of the room, with an open door behind us, I tossed the scroll to Fenella, who caught it with a flourish.
‘Perfect,’ she said, and waved the scroll in dismissal. ‘Delightful of you to visit. We must do this again sometime.’
Did that mean we were free to go? All of us? Without interference? I hesitated, alarms blaring in my mind. This was far too easy.
‘Ves,’ said Zareen. ‘She’s up to something. The ghosts— they’re—’ She broke off, crossed quickly to the nearest wall, and laid a palm against the silk wallpaper, her eyes closing.
The drawing-room door abruptly slammed shut behind us, with a resounding boom, and I heard the tumblers rattle as the lock turned.
Crap.
‘They’re what?’ I said. ‘Zar?’
‘George,’ she hissed, and her eyes flew open again, to settle accusingly on Fenella. ‘You made him do this.’
Fenella smiled. ‘George has remembered which side his bread is buttered. Shall we say that?’
‘Zar,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘They’re agitated. George is waking them up, making them—’ She paused for breath. ‘They’re preparing to move the castle.’
Uh oh. ‘Can they do that so soon?’
‘George is forcing them.’ These words emerged as a growl. ‘You can’t do this,’ she said, fixing Fenella with a wrathful stare. ‘This is why none of us wants to work with you. You use people for your own ends, and you use them until they break. You’ve broken George, and you’ll destroy these waymasters.’
‘They are dead,’ said Fenella.
‘They’re still people.’ Zareen’s eyes went ink-black from lid to lid, and she snarled something I couldn’t decipher. She was fighting back, trying to block George’s efforts to whip up the waymasters Fenella had enslaved.
She didn’t have the strength for that. Not now. She’d break, too, and I wasn’t at all sure if she would mend.
But I didn’t know how to stop her, or George either.
18
‘And where, exactly, are we going?’ Jay said coldly.
‘I think we are all feeling a little homesick, are we not?’ said Fenella pleasantly.
‘No!’ I blurted, and backed away — as if that would help. ‘I can’t go home yet!’
Fenella looked oddly at me.
‘So the plan is to kidnap the lot of us?’ said Jay disgustedly. ‘We work for you, whether we will or no?’
‘That remains to be seen,’ said Fenella. Her hostess smile had gone; her tone was now all business. ‘The fact is, I can’t have you trailing back to Mandridore with the copies of that research you have no doubt made. Or perhaps with an intact artefact you’d like me to imagine no longer exists. Ancestria Magicka will bring back British magick, and no one else.’
So that was it. Pure, naked ambition. I wasn’t surprised, but I was… out-manoeuvred. My mind blanked, and I couldn’t think. What could we do? Run for it? I made a break for the door, but Jay was there before me.
‘Locked,’ he said. ‘Give me a moment.’
Okay, he was going to punch one of his void-space holes in it. Fine, but then what? We might be able to subdue Fenella, but that would do us little good. We were in her territory. We wouldn’t get two steps beyond the door without running into more of her agents; overpowering them would slow us down. And George could be anywhere in the castle. We would never be able to find him in time to prevent him from dragging the building home.
‘Quickly,’ I said to Jay. Alban was at my elbow, and I caught a glimpse of Emellana’s purple shirt out of the corner of my eye. If we could make it to the main doors in time—
The floor began to shake. I grabbed hold of Alban to steady myself, as my heart sank and terror turned my knees to water. This was it. The castle was moments away from a potentially fatal removal to the sixth Britain — fatal for me, because all the magick in me would go off like a firework and I’d burst like a rotten melon.
‘Ves,’ said a calm, but firm voice in my ear. Emellana. ‘Help Zareen.’ Her capable hands grasped my arms; she turned me to face Zar, and gave me a gentle shove.
Help Zareen with what? My brain gibbered helplessly, and I gulped down panic. Curse it. You’d think I could face my imminent demise with a bit more grace.
Hands steadied me again, and this time they were Alban’s. ‘Calm, Ves,’ he said softly. ‘Em is right. Zareen can’t block George on her own, but with your help, perhaps she can.’
My help? I was no necromancer.
No, but I was presently functioning as a magickal power source all on my own. I was a human griffin. A magickal battery. I grabbed hold of Zareen, and tried to focus on emptying my unwanted magickal overflow into her. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ I gasped.
Alban chuckled. ‘And you’ll pull it off anyway. You always do.’
But I wouldn’t. Not this time. Because we were too late.
Even as I struggled to pump Zar full of all the power she’d need to wrest the castle away from George, the shaking of the floor intensified, and the walls began the slow, deep rumble of agitated brickwork. Someone screamed, a tearing noise that turned my insides to goo.
Zareen. She shrieked again, and began to babble, and I realised it wasn’t her screaming; she was a conduit for the dead waymasters locked into the walls. She spoke — and keened — with their voices, all ten of them at once. Her face was a mask of agony. As I watched in horror, blood began to pour from the corners of her eyes.
‘Shit,’ I said. Never mind my imminent demise. Zareen was breaking into pieces before my stupid, helpless eyes.
I didn’t have time to think. I just grabbed hold of her in a clumsy bearhug, my hands circling her wrists, and tried to make one entity of the two of us. We were not Zareen and Vesper, necromancer and magickal energiser bunny. We were Veseen, or Zaresper, one uber powerful necromancer. George was nothing to us.
The shuddering intensified. With a deep, unhappy groan, the tormented stones of Ashdown Castle tore themselves free of the Hyndorin Enclave. We vanished out of the fifth Britain in the blink of an eye.
And arrived in the familiar, deteriorated sixth. Our own, dear, magickal backwater.
I might’ve preferred to be hit with a sledgehammer.
The way I’d felt in the Other Scarborough — strained, tense, hyperactive, buzzing with prickly, stinging energy — was nothing to this. I was eight hundred Vespers crammed into one skin. I was a lit firework, my fuse burning down, explosion imminent. My overwrought brain reeled, my skin burned, my eyes leaked enough tears to fill a small lake.
I could’ve made a small lake, with a flick of my shimmering fingers.
And that was the part I really did not like. The fact that I did. Burn though I might in the fires of my own magickal potential, hurt though it did, I didn’t want to let it go. I felt as I had in Farringale, when we’d wallowed in our first magickal surge. Only better, because now I was in control. I was the surge. I could do anything I wanted — at least until I shattered into a thousand pieces.
I’d have welcomed that disintegration rather than voluntarily relinquish all that power.
Vesper, I said in the silence of my fevered mind. We are in big trouble.
I passed out, I suppose. When I was able to wrest my awareness away from the bubbling well of magick taking over my soul, I found m
yself still in Fenella Beaumont’s crummy drawing-room, though I was now receiving a rather different view of it. Too much ceiling.
I lay cradled in Alban’s arms, which was humiliating and delicious at the same time. I smiled dreamily up at his dear face, bent over me with so much concern.
‘High as a kite,’ said Jay from somewhere nearby. ‘Don’t let go of her, Alban.’
‘Never,’ he solemnly agreed.
I watched in fascination as Alban’s appearance changed before my eyes. His hair, skin and eyes washed through several colours, and he began, gradually, to grow. Then he shrank. Then he grew.
‘You’re an inconsistent size,’ I informed him. ‘Sorry.’
He grinned. ‘Actually, it’s you that’s changing.’
‘Oh.’ I thought, as best I could past the fog in my head. What had happened when I’d hugged Jay, back at the tower? He had absorbed some of my magickal overflow, which had been a good thing at the time.
Alban was now doing the same, and it wasn’t such a good thing this time. But he was bearing it.
Someone had hold of my wrist, too. I’d thought it was Alban, but when I checked I saw Jay’s slim brown fingers wrapped around my hand.
Miranda sat at my feet. She had a grip on my ankle, and she didn’t look too pleased about it. But between the three of them, they were siphoning enough off me to keep me in one piece.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Anytime,’ said Jay.
I watched for a second as waves of magick pulsed through all three of them, doing some decidedly weird things. I’d really have to get a better grip on all that. I didn’t suppose Jay much appreciated growing feathers, though the silvery eye thing was pretty cool.
I looked around.
Em had done something to Fenella. I couldn’t tell what, but I did not imagine Ms. Beaumont had taken a seat in Emellana’s enormous armchair by choice. She sat with rigidly upright posture, her face fixed in her hostess smile, her hands gripping the chair’s tapestried arms. She did not move a muscle.
I caught Em’s eye. Somewhere at the back of my mind, beneath the chaos, a feeling of foreboding stirred. Whatever Em had done, it looked eerily like a total subjection of Fenella Beaumont’s will. The kind of binding the enchanters of Vale had used upon their unicorns and griffins. The same thing, I suspected, that Fenella had done to both Em and Alban, though with less effect.
Utterly illegal in our Britain, of course.
Emellana met my gaze calmly. Had she winked? Was that my imagination? ‘Ves,’ she said. ‘Help Zareen.’
Again with the helping Zareen? Hadn’t I done that enough? I’d already ascertained that Zar was still alive and breathing, which was about as much as I’d hoped for by then. She sat slumped against the wall, white as a sheet, but the blood had ceased to spill from her eyes.
Those eyes, though, were still coal-black, and she was breathing too quickly. ‘Yes,’ she said, hearing her name, and her gaze settled on me. ‘Help me, Ves.’
She spoke far too calmly, under the circumstances, and those eyes gave me the shivers. Nonetheless, I sat up. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Mass exorcism.’
‘Oh.’
She came slowly to her feet, and steadied herself against the wall. ‘George was supposed to help me, but since he’s otherwise occupied…’
I tried to get a look out of a window. ‘Where are we?’
‘Back in the castle grounds. And here it shall stay.’
‘Make some haste,’ said Emellana. ‘She is a strong woman. I cannot hold her indefinitely.’
I wanted to just bomb out of there and go Home, but Zareen was right. We had some housekeeping to do.
I held out my hand to Zareen. ‘The rest of you had better let go,’ I suggested. ‘For a bit. Zar gets the lot.’
Alban set me on my feet, and released me, to my distant regret. I focused my attention on Zar, who, with my infusion of raw magick, was rapidly turning scary-as-hell. Again.
And I’m really not kidding. It wasn’t just the eyes. She’d been way too pale before, but now she turned stark white in an instant, and sort of ethereal, like she was half-ghost herself. She radiated an icy frigidity, cold as the grave, and my fingers froze in her grip. Magick swirled around us both, ice-cold, smelling of fresh earth and decay.
The bones stood out in Zareen’s face. She was half cadaver, a creature of nightmares.
I hung grimly on, and shut my eyes to block out the sight.
But instead of the soothing blackness I’d expected, I received a different vision. I saw — or sensed — the outlines of the castle, magick glimmering in every brick. Shadowed motes blossomed all over the beleaguered place, grave-cold, trailing miasmas of despair. Were these the dead waymasters? I saw why Zareen had been so enraged. Every scrap of light or warmth had been wrested from them; they cowered, shattered and exhausted.
They deserved peace.
But peace was not quite what Zareen delivered. I felt her beside me, radiating icy fury. She was stronger than ever before; we were strong. We were one again, for an instant, and she was a queen of the dead as she stretched out her will and took hold of every one of those dark presences.
Then, with the negligent twist of a gardener uprooting a weed, she ripped them free of their earthly bindings and sent them sailing into the void.
With something like a gusty exhalation, Ashdown Castle settled around us, brick by brick, its animating forces dispatched.
‘No,’ gasped Fenella, twitching. ‘My castle.’ She was moving, slowly but surely, and though Em fought to hold her, she’d lost her grip. Fenella Beaumont, powerful as she was arrogant, wrested herself free of Emellana’s magick and surged to her feet. Ignoring Em, her face twisted with fury, she made straight for Zareen — and me.
19
Let it be noted: there are drawbacks to radiating magick like some kind of arcane halogen heater.
It might sound like a good deal, and it certainly has its upsides (see: Zareen’s casual exorcism of a ten-strong haunting team, with a flick of her cadaverous fingers).
The downsides, though? For one, it should not be possible for other people to soak up magick like a sponge, just by touching me. It meant I wasn’t so much a magickal battery as a broken tap, spewing precious magickal resources every which way with no semblance of control. And if I wasn’t in possession of enough hangers-on to take some of the magickal overload, I’d probably burst.
That was really going to play hell with my social life.
For another thing, magick is super fun and all (see: never-ending chocolate pots, and rainbow hair), but it’s also scary as hell and dangerous beyond all reason. Give a furious and exhausted woman access to a convenient magickal reservoir, let her be possessed of terrifying necromantic powers, and top it all off by putting her in immediate danger, and… the results are not pretty.
Here’s what happened to Fenella Beaumont.
‘Shit,’ said Zareen, as Fenella rampaged in our direction, wearing the expression of a woman intent on nothing but our total destruction.
It was hard to blame her, even. We did have a regrettable way of wrecking her stuff.
‘Do you have any idea what you have just done?’ she screamed, mostly at Zareen, but her rage certainly included me. ‘Ten waymaster spirits! There probably aren’t another ten left in Britain! All that work — what we’ve expended — the rarity — my castle! Ruined!’
I listened, faintly intrigued. I’d never heard anyone literally splutter with fury before.
It occurred to me that I ought to be more worried, but I felt spacy and detached, like I existed on a different magickal plane to everyone else. Perhaps I did.
Zareen, though, was in no way detached. She squared up to Fenella, our own personal Queen of the Dead versus the woman who enslaved spirits, hauled entire castles from world to world, and had built a magickal organisation to rival every other known to man.
They ought to have been evenly matched.
Th
ey would have been, if it wasn’t for me.
‘Stop there,’ said Zareen, icy-cold, and her voice boomed and echoed, as though she spoke from the middle of a thunderstorm. Or as though she was the thunderstorm.
‘Or what?’ spat Fenella. ‘You’ve already done your worst.’ She whipped out a rose-quartz Wand, and power built around her in waves. Pressure built. Two elemental forces faced off against one another.
‘Ves,’ hissed Jay, and hands pulled at me. ‘You need to get out of here.’
I understood where he was coming from. Any bystanders to this particular fight were likely to end up smashed to smithereens, and I was already in a vulnerable state.
But, leaving Zar to face Fenella’s wrath alone was not an option. I shook my head, resisting his — and Alban’s — attempts to peel me away.
‘My worst?’ said Zareen, and smiled. ‘Not quite.’
I braced myself for an explosion of some kind, but… nothing happened.
Instead, I felt a faint woosh. A small ocean of magick poured out of me; Zareen took it, and with a tilt of her head and a blink of her coal-black eyes, she directed it with devastating force.
Fenella keeled over backwards, and lay inert as a stone.
For about five long seconds, no one spoke.
‘You’ve killed her,’ said Jay, and ran to kneel beside Fenella. He peered into her eyes, shook her, and finally checked her pulse. ‘She’s dead.’
‘She is not dead,’ said Zareen, and the thunder had yet to fade from her voice.
‘Stone dead,’ Jay said. ‘See for yourself.’
I, drained, slithered to the ground in an inelegant heap. As I released Zareen, the cadaver began to fade from her appearance. Her skin regained a little of its normal colour; flesh returned to her bones, and some of the black drained out of her eyes. She began to shake, but when she spoke again, her words emerged like steel bullets. ‘All right, she’s temporarily dead.’
‘Temporarily?’ I said, faintly. ‘What did you do to her?’
‘Soul-ripped her.’ Zareen spoke with awful casualness, and shrugged.
‘Which is what—’ I began.
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