Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (46 page)

The tower rose from the middle of a relatively thick forest and seemed to reach clear into the clouds, though it was hard to tell against the night sky. A moon larger than Earth’s, at least from our viewpoint, was shining full in that sky, and its light made every inch of the tower sparkle as if a million stars had been used to build it.

Knowing the way my life worked, you might have guessed that we couldn’t just walk up to the tower, and you would have been right. We had taken only a few steps away from the portal when the vegetation around us began to attack. Nurse Florence and Vanora both seemed surprised as vines tried to immobilize our limbs, thorns tried to tear our flesh, and tree limbs tried to dash out our brains. Apparently the Order’s records had not alluded to this particular defense mechanism.

I would have liked to charm the vegetation to stay away from us, but I sensed it was under the grip of too powerful a spell, and in any case, there wasn’t really enough time, so I drew White Hilt and started burning through our leafy opponents. Gordy, realizing the ice sword was more effective in this case than the fear one, froze everything he could hit. Shar broke the enchantment on whatever he hit, rendering it immobile. All the other guys just hacked away, but since faerie weapons could cut pretty much whatever they hit, they still made good headway. Even Khalid’s faerie dagger did its share of damage.

I didn’t have the nerve to point out that Eva’s self-defense course wasn’t helping her much in this situation, but I’m sure she realized that herself. She and Carla were constantly getting into trouble and having to be rescued, much to the embarrassment of both of them. (And no, I’m not being sexist. If they had decent weapons, they could probably at least have protected themselves, even without training. This wouldn’t have been a good place for anyone to be unarmed, even a guy.)

After two hours of hard fighting, we had cut a wide swath through the forest, leading from the portal to the base of the tower. Fortunately, the immediate area around the tower was clear of vegetation, and no wandering vines tried to grab us once we had reached that area. That, at least, was something.

My muscles ached by that time. Jimmie, probably unused to being in someone else’s body, was having a hard time holding on, my headache was getting to be about the size of San Francisco, and I could feel the darkness stirring, sensing an opportunity.

Yeah, it was something to be “out of the woods”—until the ground next to the tower turned suddenly into water, and we all dropped into it like rocks.

Clearly, this was not normal water. It shined like water in the moonlight, but it seemed thicker somehow, harder to swim through, yet also easier to sink into: a magical concoction that was simultaneously lighter and heavier than ordinary water.

Since it was hard to swim and cast spells at the same time, and since I wouldn’t have known what to do with this arcane muck anyway, magic was not much help in this situation. Some of us might have drowned if not for Carlos. He had said to me recently that he sometimes felt “like a fish out of water” on our adventures, because he wasn’t quite as good a swordsman as the others and didn’t feel as useful. This time, though, his experience as an aquatic athlete was all that stood between some of us and death.

Shar, probably because of Zom’s anti-magic properties, stood on one lone piece of solid land, and he could get the water to pull away from the blade, but the water filled in right after. He was safe, but he was unable to help others. Gordy, Dan, Stan (with his muscle-enhancing sword) and I managed (just barely) to keep ourselves from drowning, but we couldn’t have simultaneously rescued someone else. Our two ladies of the lake found themselves powerless against this not-exactly-water, and Eva and Carla were just not strong enough swimmers. Carlos was the only swimmer powerful enough to rescue the ladies and then help the rest of us get to shore. I managed to magick up his stamina, and he fell down exhausted right after, but he had gotten the job done somehow.

Well, we were still alive, but we had no obvious way to approach the tower. Khalid could have jumped over the water, but then what? Climb up the tower? The surface was too slippery, and anyway climbing the surface would have done no good. I could have flown over, but then what? We needed to be able to stand next to the tower and really examine it. Or did we?

“Vanora, has anyone ever tried hitting the tower with two extremes simultaneously, like very hot and very cold?”

“Not that I know of,” replied Vanora.

“Gordy, please give me the ice sword.” He handed it over, and I held it in my left hand, with White Hilt in my right. It took me a few minutes to manipulate both swords at the same time, especially with my intensifying headache, but I managed to do it, and then I sprayed the left of the tower with ice, simultaneously engulfing the right in flame. The tower had resisted the two opposite forces individually before, but never both at once—until now.

My best efforts, cold enough to freeze a big lake, hot enough to burn a forest, produced no visible change in the tower. I had been hoping that opposing tendencies to expand or contract, depending on temperature, might have caused cracking, but if so, it was undetectably small. After that I had to take a rest and have Nurse Florence and Vanora reinforce my control. My exertion had almost weakened me enough for the darkness to have another shot at taking over, and Jimmie, still hanging on valiantly, was putting out a much more pale and flickering light than the pure radiance he had started with. If there was an answer here, we needed to find it quickly.

Then it hit me. “Vanora, how about sonic vibrations?”

She froze for a second. “Well, no, I don’t think so. There was no real way to weaponize sound that way in earlier times. I suppose spells could have been designed for that, but sorcerers typically went after more obviously destructive forces like fire. People knew the story of Joshua and the trumpets at the battle of Jericho, but everyone assumed that feat was done by the power of God and could not be replicated by men. I doubt it would have occurred to Nimue to defend against that kind of attack.”

“Great!” I could see light at the end of the tunnel now. “Vanora, could you and Nurse Florence enclose everyone else in a soundproof bubble. What I want to try could be deafening.” I waited until they figured out how to do that, and then I went to work.

I began by singing a song of liberation in Welsh, letting magical power build as I did so. I had to experiment to figure out how to do what I wanted, but it did not take me too long to figure out how to modulate the sound of my voice, making it progressively louder and higher in pitch. It wasn’t long before I was hitting the tower with wave after wave of extremely high-frequency sound far more powerful than anything a human voice could ever produce naturally.

From Taliesin 1’s studies of magic I knew that even the most powerful magic could not produce an object that was truly indestructible. The universe always seemed to insist that there be some flaw, however small, in that invulnerability. Since the magic was shaped by the mind using it, Nimue’s world view might determine what kind of flaws existed in the tower; if she didn’t see something as a threat, she might not have protected against it specifically.

Great…in theory. However, she could have taken the Jericho story to heart and sound-proofed the tower, in which case I was wasting my time. For all I knew, throwing pomegranates at the tower would bring it down. I could spend years testing different methods—except that I didn’t have years. More like minutes. I could feel the darkness rising again, and Jimmie was hanging on by his fingernails.

Then, just when I was about to give up, I began to see the tower vibrating, and I knew there was a chance. The chance became a certainty when I could hear a cracking sound, and shortly afterward, cracks became visible, weaving their way across the entire tower. Finally the tower gave way in one highly satisfying crash, making the most enormous pile of glass shards I could imagine. They still sparkled in the moonlight, but they were no longer a prison. Assuming the crash hadn’t killed Merlin—yeah, that thought did cross my mind—then he should be free now.

The others, finally able to leave their sound-proof bubble, cheered. We had accomplished the first part of our mission.

Much to my relief, I could see a figure rising from the ruined tower. Who could it be but Merlin?

As the figure flew closer, my relief crashed as completely as the tower.

He was Merlin all right, or at least what little was left of him. His robe was tattered, his hair wildly uncombed, his eyes lit not by insanity but by hellfire. During his fifteen hundred years trapped in the tower, his demonic side had apparently taken over completely.

Yeah, you heard right—we were facing the dark version of perhaps the most powerful wizard who ever lived, and from his facial expression, he was not putting out the welcome mat…unless he intended to make one out of our skin!

CHAPTER 16: DARKNESS IS THE NEW LIGHT

“Prepare to die!” yelled the demonic Merlin in a booming voice as he shot toward me. Yeah, nothing like the direct approach.

My best bet was to reach Shar and get my hands on Zom. A couple good blasts of anti-magic should render even Merlin helpless, at least for a short time. Unfortunately, we hadn’t moved into a tight formation as we should have, and I was some distance away from the others. Merlin saw which direction I was running and sprayed the area between me and the group with fire bursts, creating a wall of flame between us that burned so hot I could feel it from yards away.

Having isolated me, he started aiming the fire directly at me. I used White Hilt to surround myself in my own flame and absorb the hostile blasts, but the strategy just barely worked. Just as the water around the tower had been unlike normal water, Merlin’s fire was unlike normal fire. It burned hotter, yet it seemed somehow to move more slowly, almost as if it were heavier. If I wasn’t careful, the stuff would drip right through my fire shield. Preventing that result required considerable maneuvering, and I was already so tired from shattering the tower, a situation complicated by the darkness within me, which seemed to be doing flip-flops as Merlin got closer. Jimmie? He was still there, his light flickering like a single candle. I guess ghosts could become exhausted in this kind of supernatural struggle, and his strength was pretty close to gone.

In an effort to confuse Merlin, I raised myself to faerie speed and scrambled, not toward the rest of my group, but off to one side. Frankly, I didn’t want to risk Merlin trying to fire bomb everyone else before they could get close enough to Shar. Despite his great power, Merlin’s speed was that of a normal human, and it did not seem to occur to him to speed himself up, so for a while at least my efforts to dodge him worked, though it was not long before his hot, slow fire was burning in undulating patches all over the place. Somewhere I could feel Vanora and Nurse Florence pooling their resources for some kind of defensive spell, but I doubted they would have much luck against the kind of off-beat, high intensity magic that Merlin could throw at them. Still, I guessed some protection was better than none.

I wondered what was happening to the guys. By now Shar, whom Zom made immune to any magic fire, even Merlin’s, should be close, but I saw no sign of him. Then I realized I was hearing the sound of swords biting into wood. Looking in the general direction of the sounds, I could see a little over the wall of fire, just enough to make out waving branches, and I realized that some more distant part of the forest had sneaked up while everyone was watching me and had attacked as soon as Merlin was free.

I was wearing down a little, slowing, and Merlin’s fiery attacks were getting closer. Not only that, but the darkness was surging again; Jimmie’s presence was now too faint to stop it, though he was still struggling valiantly against it. I needed more of a plan than just taking evasive action, but my head was pounding worse than ever. I also thought the increasingly pervasive smoke was beginning to get to me. I could smell it everywhere, my lungs ached, and my breathing was getting ragged.

Suddenly Khalid was at my side, dagger in hand. “Tal, what can I do?”

“Get back, Khalid! Merlin may not be able to burn you, but he could switch attacks at any moment.”

“That’s assuming he sees me coming!” he said with a grin, and then he was gone, moving faster than I could right at that moment. He ran fast as lightning across the burning land, then shot straight up in the air, straight at Merlin, dagger glinting in the firelight.

Khalid was faster than Merlin, but Merlin had seen him coming, figured out he was immune to fire, and, with one flash of lightning from his hands, swept Khalid from the sky, sending him tumbling toward the ground at sickening speed. Merlin had not had the time to conjure maximum power; even so, it was clear Khalid was gravely injured—and Merlin could always take another shot.

At that moment I had been on the verge of succumbing to the darkness, but seeing Khalid in trouble, maybe even dying, sent my adrenaline clear off the charts. Without really knowing what I was doing, I shot light into that darkness, much grayer perhaps than what Jimmie had been able to project at his full strength, but enough to check the darkness’s relentless advance. At the same time, I flew with bullet-like speed at the falling Khalid, grabbed him in midair, and cannonballed toward the rest of my party. Merlin might follow, but now I had to risk it. I was not the healer Nurse Florence or Vanora was, but I could tell Khalid needed one. I could see the electrical burn on his left side, not looking so bad on the surface but extending, I was sure, much deeper into his tissues. I could feel him shaking in my arms, shaking almost convulsively.