Chapter Twenty-Nine
I worked on the final preparations for Mordon's finding spell while waiting for Mordon to ferry the rest of our group to me. Three more times I explained the plan, once each to Lilly, Leif, and Barnes. Or rather, I explained it twice to Lilly. Barnes saw the spell I was working on and finished it for me.
“There has got to be a better idea than playing storm the evil fortress!” Lilly declared.
“It's this or we go to the sorcering council and jump through heaps of loops and by the time they are willing to do something, it will be too late,” I said with a shrug at her oversimplification. Sadly, it was an accurate description.
“I don't like it,” she said.
I didn't much like it, either.
“I like the Storm the Evil Fortress Plan. Simple, to the point, and best of all, it sounds like war,” said Barnes with a toothy grin.
Lilly rolled her eyes.
Leif looked up from helping Mordon stabilize my compass trinket. “Constable, I hope if this is reminiscent of combat it is closer to a battle than to a war.”
“We will see,” said Mordon. “Here's the knife, Barnes. Fera, you'll have to give him a breath of wind as soon as—”
“—as soon as he does that hand-wavy thing and flicks his fingers.”
Mordon nodded, but his eyes were wary. He hadn't liked me using his spell with modifications for the entire group, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
Lilly hesitated. “This is gray magic.”
I put my arm over her shoulder. “The coven that grays together, stays together.”
Leif stared at me, unamused, while Barnes snickered. Leif said, “That was terrible.”
I gave him a mock-bow.
Barnes started on the spell, this one more of a ritual using hand motions rather than one which required words. Though I followed it in my head without problems, one look at Lilly was all it took for me to see that she was utterly lost. Leif was only a little better. Mordon's mouth was a grim line.
I was eager for my cue in the same way a hound anticipates a fox hunt. I shouldn't be so excited for this, but I was. I should be frightened. I was frightened. My palms were sweaty, my throat had a lump in it, and my hands quivered. But I was also looking forward to my second chance to get this right. This time, I would have Railey. I had to.
Mordon finished his part of the spell and drew the blade over his palm. Blood welled in its wake, dripping off his little finger onto the center of the circle on the sand. As drop after drop fell, I suddenly felt sick. Just the sight of him bleeding made me feel nauseous and dizzy, surprising me very much. If it were me bleeding, I wouldn't think twice about it. Why fret over a simple skin break?
I almost missed my cue, but I remembered just in time to make the wind follow the pattern on the ground. I was entranced by the pattern itself. Closing my eyes, I felt like I was winding through a maze, washing up each turn, racing down the straightway, then spinning in the center. For an instant, I felt I was being pulled into a tunnel like water down a drain. On the other side, I felt the enemy, standing guard, ready.
I swayed on my feet, and realized I was back with the others and Barnes was solidifying the spell. I had never left, but I couldn't think of a rational explanation for what I had experienced. Mordon's eyes darted up to mine and I gave him a weak smile.
I said nothing about the ambush as the others were preparing to step through the gaping black hole in the air in front of Barnes. I had an idea about how to cope with it, and I didn't want the others to freeze up or be nervous.
“Barnes and I should go first, with Mordon taking up the rear,” I said with an authoritativeness I didn't feel.
Leif approved, though he frowned at me, knowing I wasn't telling all. I refused to offer the information. Barnes put his hand through the hole. “After you.”
I stepped into the darkness and was swept off my feet by a current, almost losing the invisibility ring I was putting on. I rolled with hard twists and turns, the magic pulsing about my ears and chilling me to the bone with its clammy touch. Something tried to snag my clothes. It might have been my imagination or the wind in my ears. I gasped for a breath, inhaling the stench of molding seaweed.
My feet skidded across stone and gritty sand. Rolling, I stopped in a kneeling position. Before my eyes could adjust to the dim light or the other side could start their trap, I touched the ground and cast a fey circle. Spells rammed it before the circle fully closed and the circle sprang to life, casting luminescence into the shadows. Several more spells energized the circle when Barnes thudded next to me, not even disoriented.
“Gremlins, pixies, and an ogre,” Barnes said. He pointed, almost hitting me in my invisible face. “Take down the ogre, I'll work on the rest.”
I touched the circle and the energy flowed into me, but instead of releasing it harmlessly like before, I pulled it together into a ball the size of my head and shot it into the shadowy area Barnes had indicated.
Much to my relief, the ogre was closer than I thought. The energy bolt sunk into his chest, blowing him backwards and taking smaller opponents with him. The ogre hung in the air for a second, then his head cracked against a stone and he was still.
I staggered, dizzy, my vision darkened for a few seconds. I could hear Barnes and gremlins fighting in the distance, but I couldn't see them. Someone else entered the fray, skidding like me, landing on their butt. Then another two people came through. There was a shriek and two muttering voices.
Flashes of Mordon's fire bolts illuminated Leif helping Lilly to her feet. Mordon's fire was directed at the pixies amassing in swarms. Nest had once referred to pixies as clouds. Now I understood why. They were like thunderclouds made from gigantic hornets.
No one tried to make a light yet, letting Barnes take advantage of the dark for as long as was possible. I ducked a flaming bolt and tried to organize my scattered thoughts.
Lightning streaked from Leif's wand, dropping several pixies to the ground. The line through the cloud was quickly filled back in. Closing my watering eyes against the blinding light, I focused on the wind around the pixie swarm closing in on the trio.
I could feel their wing beats, frantic as a hummingbird and just as noisy, and I reached out to the air, making the resistance against their wings stop. They fell to the floor, shouting in high-pitched squeals. Despite needle-like swords, Leif crushed any underfoot that he could, searing them with lightning while Mordon shifted into his dragon form.
With one fiery breath melting sand to glass, the pixies stopped moving. Molten earth and overcooked dinner filled my nose; I sneezed. Mordon swung his head and didn't stop in time. I ducked beneath his chin, brushing it with a hand, finding that his scales were warm from breathing fire. Mordon smelled me and looked away.
The air filled with thousands of humming wings. I winced, not looking forward to when they came. The noises from Barnes and the gremlins had stopped. I hoped that was a good sign.
“Fera? Where are you?” It was Leif.
“By Mordon.”
“Can you do that again?”
I felt the wind and gritted my teeth. “They're farther apart this time. It's too big an area.”
Brilliant light filled the cavern, making me squeeze my eyes shut. Even so, I saw red through my eyelids and I could not adjust to the pain fast enough, my heart thudding from being startled. I should have asked Lilly to hold up a light so we couldn't have been blinded like this.
Eyes watering, I forced them open, saw past purple splotches. Barnes was in physical combat with a woman, wrestling for her staff.
Buzzing grew louder and louder in my ears. We were ringed by thousands of hoovering pixies—and below them, ten sorcerers were in the beginning of a chant. I didn't know what chant it was, but my bet was that it wasn't going to be good.
Sucking in a breath, I pulled the wind into a single burst, crashing pixies and tiny swords down into the flesh of the sorcerers. It was more effective than I thought it would b
e, causing several to jump in surprise, a couple to cry out in shock—which disturbed their neighbors—and one pixie even jabbed his sword into another's eye. Not every sorcerer was distracted, though, and I blinked watering eyes in time to see a wand lowered in my direction. A green light exploded from its tip. I sprawled over Mordon's claw, coming to rest on hot, ridged glass.
Glad I hadn't cracked my head over the stone, I pulled the invisibility ring off and stowed it in a pocket. If there were at least two vampires here, it wouldn't do me any good. Magic-using vampires were a bit of a rare find, and I wondered who had the money and connections to bring them together.
“Lilly!” cried Leif.
Lilly lay unmoving over a bed of stones, a glowing trail of smoke leaving her chest. Leif was not far, but he scarcely took one step before pixies dove on him.
“Get the eyes! The eyes! The nose!” a chorus of shrill voices cried, but they weren't after Leif. Above us was cloud so thick they blocked out the light.
I yelled, “Mordon! Get away from here!”
He stopped his snapping, each mouthful slaying a swarm, to look at me and nod. As he moved away, most of the pixies went with him.
“Leif, hold your breath.”
My energy was whittling already but I put my hands together then pulled them apart, drawing air away from around Leif's head. My hope had been that the pixies would fall, but as they fell they clung to his clothes, ears, and face, stabbing him. He worked with his hand, shooting bolts, then took to grabbing them by the handful.
My vacuum fell, and he took the panting pixies, crushing them beneath his boots. He reached Lilly, coming under fire from sorcerers, his cheek a pincushion to so many swords.
I took a step towards them, walking into a puddle of melted ice. The cold seeped up my leg, numbing up to my knee, and my skin grew even more frosty. Crawling up my leg was a black shadow, dark cirrus clouds leading the way up my thigh. I couldn't feel my foot past dull deadness and thumps against the floor.
“Leif!” I yelled, taking the compass from about my neck and hurling it. He caught it.
I didn't know where Barnes was, but when I checked on the sorcerers next, there were only five still standing. Barnes moved from one shadow to the next in a way that didn't seem possible for a human to do, striking his opponents and disappearing before they could turn around.
A roar shook the cavern as Mordon crashed to the floor in a roll, squishing pixies, his tail flashing out and hitting Griff. I ducked beneath a wing, receiving a pixie across my shoulders. It giggled and stabbed me, thrusting the needle deep into the muscle in my back. I slammed my hands together and the air crumpled the tiny form, smashing it as effectively as two heavy books would have.
The shadow was now about my hips, and I was losing all sensation. I fell to my knees, checked that Mordon was on the ground, and started to pull the air around in a slow dust devil. It caught the pixies off guard. I smashed them into a wall. I heard more buzzing, but it was distant. Too distant. The shadow was up to my ribcage. I fought to maintain connection with my magic.
Gregor's voice flowed through the cavern. “I knew it would be too great a task for you to manage this ambuscade, Griff, but I do love being proved correct. Get out of my sight. Let me contain the situation.”
Leif had not yet left; he didn't seem to know how to make the chain longer and Lilly was pale. Leif was shaking, kneeling over her still body, deflecting spells as they came. Since I couldn't walk, I rolled to them when Gregor closed his eyes.
Gregor raised his arms and shouted two words that hung in the air like knives. I crawled over Lilly to yank more links into the chain. She had no response. No breathing. I saw now why her brother had failed to lengthen the chain; he could scarcely clench his fist for all his shaking.
“You can't do any good here,” said Leif, gritting his teeth. “You'll need to come back with us.”
“Two is the limit for the compass. You and Lilly. Get her better,” I said, tossing the chain over both of them before Leif could object.
The compass took them away.
I let out a slow breath, wondering what was to be done with the thing wrapped about my waist, wondering how Mordon was going to get away with his life, wondering what I had gotten us all into. Determined, I examined the situation again.
Gregor no longer looked very human. His bones were growing, stretching skin that somehow kept getting thinner, becoming a nearly transparent membrane. Decay and lesions mottled his body and the stench of the grave wafted off him, coming with each breath past his bloody lips. Sunken eyes, shoved deep in their sockets, glowed red as he looked about.
“A wendigo,” said Barnes in my ear. I jumped. He pulled me into a sitting position.
“What is it?”
“It's what cannibals can turn into. With every victim, they grow in proportion to their meal so their hunger only intensifies.”
Gregor spoke, his voice raspy and clotted, as though it came from a throat filled with soil, “You have recited the Mother Goose version of the tale. Tell her the Brothers Grimm. Tell her what happens when I eat sorcerers.”
My stomach lurched. I had a horrific idea that black magic, cannibalism, and sorcerers equaled out to be a terrible monster…a monster with great magic and greater greed. Barnes read my expression and said, “It's worse.”
I didn't want to find out what could be worse than that. I was fighting back images of Gregor wearing a suit, sitting to a candlelit table and calmly eating a serving of human steak, washing it down with a glass of wine. That was how I saw him doing it, at least at first. Later, would he simply rip into raw flesh? Tear into it with all the savagery that cannibalism conjured?
And I realized the reason for the ambush. I did not know who his victims had been, but they weren't as high profile, or as powerful, as any one of my companions.
“Barnes?” I asked, but he was already thinking the same thing, and from the annoyed twitch of his mustache, Barnes was not going to have anything to do with being a meal.
“Imagine. After today, I will be peerless.” Gregor spat thick specks of blood past long, broken teeth.
“You won't touch her,” Mordon growled, the rumble making dirt tumble down from the cavern ceiling.
“I was not planning on it. Not yet. Once Morgana Le Fey assumes her body, I will eat them both. Imagine, a sorcerer worse than the sworn enemy of Merlyn. The lambs will have no choice but to submit, and once again the sorcerers will have no reason to hide behind portal doors and pretend they do not exist.”
Gregor could have continued, but Mordon interrupted him with a burst of fire unlike anything I had seen him do before. The rocks oozed and bubbled and pixies too close had their wings combust, then fell onto the lava before folding into the mire. I almost felt bad for them. The firestorm continued as Barnes turned to me.
“Is there any way to get this thing off?” I asked, holding my arms away from my body. From the armpits down, I was lost in black clouds. I couldn't feel anything anymore, but with my chest growing colder, I was encompassed in shakes and shudders.
Barnes reached for a curl of the fog and seized it. He started pulling it back, pulling it away, but it slipped out of his grasp time and again. Brow sweating, he tried again, and again, until the ground shook as Mordon's body collapsed against it and the cavern trembled with his pants.
“It's like there are hundreds of wills fighting my own,” said Barnes.
My nightmares were becoming real.
A wet, hacking laugh echoed to us. Past the waving heat rays and the red flows of rock stood the wendigo, his skin blackened and peeling back to reveal bleeding flesh and white bone.
“Barnes,” I whispered. “You and Mordon find a way to get out of here. He can't have your strength.”
“I can't leave you,” said Barnes. “And neither will Mordon.”
I shut my eyes and I felt the tug of the sea. “Barnes,” I said. “I know how to do this.”
Mordon's roar echoed through the cavern agai
n, and I saw the wendigo on his back, tearing up scales with bony claws. Barnes scrambled up Mordon's shoulder, his hands black with magic.
Ignoring the stench of seared rotten meat, I turned back to the vase, looking at the painted woman, noticing her blue eyes. My hand shook on its path toward her.
A dark, forked tongue wrapped around my arm and pulled it toward the misty mouth of the shadow around my waist. It squeezed. Looking down, I saw a serpentine shape taking the form of an eastern dragon. I thought that I'd dreamed him sometime.
I couldn't breathe. If he didn't let go of me, I was going to drag hundreds of souls with me. I hesitated, and the dragon gained a few more inches. Then I stretched out my arm again, my fingers wavering, almost ready to touch the vase when something hit me over my head and my eyelids dropped.