Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (12 page)

“No, but I know a number of retired guardians who’d be happy to offer any of the current crop an intensive and unrequested training session.”

“Ouch.” She scooped up her tomato and savored the fresh basil she’d chopped and sprinkled over it.

“You don’t think that’s too harsh?” he looked at her quizzically.

She crunched some bacon. “This one let a fire mage conk him on the head and attack us. I think there should be some sort of punishment for that.”

“You’d make a solid guardian trainer. Every lesson reinforced.” He finished the last bite of sausage, having swished it through a small pool of egg yolk on his plate.

She grinned. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’ll clean up, then go visit Morag.”

“We’ll visit Morag,” she corrected.

“If you like.”

“I can work as easily there as here. Morag links me to the internet, and
no one
can track me back through the loops she uses. Setting a firebug on me has just made this personal.”

It had made it personal for Lewis, too, but he didn’t tell Gina. He felt responsible, though. The Group of 5 wouldn’t have sent a fire mage after her if he hadn’t let himself get caught up with her dragon and his not-so-considered plan of utilizing Gina’s hacking skills.

He owed her protection, and without magic, he couldn’t deliver it.

The Collegium guardians weren’t his personal security force—and no more than he would Gina appreciate being shadowed by them. So they weren’t a defense.

Morag had to show him how to use the Deeper Path for more than popping in and out of places. At a minimum, he needed to know if his translocation just worked for him or if holding onto someone, he could bring them with him. Then he and Gina could never be trapped.

The image of the cruise ship he’d saved in the North West Passage played in his brain. He’d seen the stricken vessel after the unnatural storm abated. He’d been aboard the rescue mission. Magic burned he might have been, but he’d been a functioning, trained pair of hands for manual labor. The exhausted remnants of terror on the survivors’ faces had shown him the horror of helpless captivity.

To be at the mercy of forces beyond your control was part of life. But to be battered by powers directed by evil intent…that was soul-crushing.

He walked into the under-the-stairs closet with Gina, and out to Morag’s chamber.

Gina seated herself at the table and opened one of the two laptops she carried.

He walked three steps away and let the chamber’s other dimensions carry him further as he shifted into clarity of sight. He could still see Gina and the silver tinsel that linked her laptop to the internet. Curious, he followed that tinsel and found a deeper layer, one flashing with numbers and logic, structures he couldn’t comprehend.

“The human internet crudely mimics the universal ordering of information,” Morag said. “I noted the fire mage’s intrusion on Gina’s home.”

Lewis glanced at Gina, who worked on, unaware of Morag’s presence or the conversation. “Would you have saved her?”

“Non-intervention.” Pale yellow smoke gusted from the dragon’s nostrils. “But Gina’s home has been in her family many years. Dragon knights before her have lived there or visited family in it. Three of them, including Gina’s aunt, have travelled the Deeper Path. They sunk protections in multiple dimensions around the house. Look at its borders with clarity of sight.”

So Gina was truly safe in her home. Tension that had clawed at Lewis’s gut relaxed. “I still need to learn.”

“Yes.” The dragon unfolded her vast wings. “Watch how I change your three dimensional reality.”

Four hours later he was cold through to his bones, but what he had learned…it made the magic he’d burned out seem like a child’s toy: shiny and comforting, but limited. Now he could ripple the world, plucking things from one dimension to change their place or shape or some other characteristic in another dimension. What seemed far away or unrelated in three dimensions, might be closely linked in five dimensions, or even the same thing in six dimensions.

Morag showed him the seventh dimension. But it broke his concentration.

“Enough,” she said.

“Morag, you’re here.” Gina looked up from the two laptops and smiled. “Lewis was hoping for some more training.”

The dragon hunkered down on the floor, tail curling around her clawed front feet. The opal walls danced pale reflected color over her black skin. Her blue alien eyes darkened. “He received it.”

“Oh. I thought I was to observe his Deeper Path training.”

Lewis knew there was something odd in her tone, but his mind was still on all that he’d learned. He understood why it was called the Deeper Path. It compelled you further into the unknown.

“I miscalculated,” Morag said.

That caught his attention.

“I thought that there would be time and safety for you to observe Lewis.” The dragon sighed, smokeless this time. “But there are other players, people who would make you unsafe. Having showed Lewis the Deeper Path he needed to learn enough of it swiftly so as not to cause damage.” Her alien eyes studied him. “Fortunately, he is not a reckless man.”

“No, he’s not.” Gina closed the laptops. She concentrated very hard on the action.

“Visit me soon, Gina.” Morag vanished.

Gina’s mouth compressed. She stood, holding the laptops and walked towards the space that linked her to the closet under the stairs in her home.

Lewis waited a moment. He didn’t need to use Morag’s translocation structure. He found the near-link from the dragon’s den to Gina’s kitchen and crossed into it.

Gina blinked as she walked into the kitchen and found him facing her. The knuckles of her hands went white where she gripped the laptops. “I guess you don’t need our cover story any more. You can visit Morag whenever you like.”

“I have her permission to do so,” he confirmed.

“And you won’t have to use portal travel anymore.”

“I still need to conform to ordinary behavior patterns. I can translocate when it won’t attract attention.”

“Uh huh.” She put the laptops on the kitchen table.

He thought he understood her concern. “You won’t need to pretend to be my girlfriend any longer. Then, if you don’t track the Group of 5 through the dark web anymore, they’ll lose interest in you.”

“Hmm.”

“And Morag says you’re safe here.”

She looked at him then. “How long did you train with Morag this morning?”

“From within a few minutes of arriving in her home.”

“Hmm.” Gina pulled her phone out of a pocket. “I think…no signal?”

He switched on his phone. “The network must have gone down. If the Collegium was trying to contact me, they’d have sent someone in person through Emmaline’s portal. Is there anyone standing outside your wards?”

“They’ll think we ignored them on purpose.” Gina’s green eyes narrowed in a frown of concentration before widening in shock. She dashed to the window. “Lewis!”

“What?” Standing beside her at the window he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The midday sun had burned away the night’s sea fog. The garden was green and tidy with splashes of color from all the flowers.

He slammed into clarity of sight, and the scene lit with a swirling silver energy. The garden remained peaceful, but out beyond the protective wards, vast amounts of energy surged. Someone, or more than one someone, was throwing around magic. “What do you see?”

“I can’t see past the garden.” Gina gripped the counter edge, pushing up on her toes. “But when I stretch out to sense the outer edge of the house’s wards, there’s trouble. The attic!”

She dashed across the kitchen and opened a cupboard door.

Lewis blinked. Not a cupboard. A staircase. When the house was built, these would have been the servants’ stairs, narrow and steep.

Gina ran up them and he followed.

The attic windows were small and square, tucked beneath the eaves of the house, but they provided a commanding view back towards town. Ignoring the stacked boxes and shrouded furniture in the center of the floor space, he accepted a pair of binoculars Gina translocated and handed to him.

A second pair appeared in her hand, and she adjusted and focused them. “There. Beyond the crooked pine tree. Can you see the crows circling? I’ve lifted the look-away spell, just for the moment.”

And without the spell’s obscuring aura, the chaos was obvious. Four guardians, one of whom was Kora, fought against seven highly effective combat mages. They had to be mages or Kora could have disabled them instantly. As it was, from the way the attackers had backed Kora and her three colleagues against the protective and defensive ward of Gina’s home, the Group of 5 must have spent a fortune to hire the best.

Lewis lowered the binoculars as trees whipped forward and back, some splintering, and debris whirled high in the air in a freak tornado. It crashed into the barrier of Gina’s wards and the spell powering it disintegrated.

Gina cried out. “They’re going to hurt my neighbors. And my family has to have noticed power like this. They’re being so reckless. I will not have my family in the middle of this fight. One of those mages is flinging plague spells.”

With his magic burned out Lewis couldn’t read the spells. Possibly the Deeper Path would reveal a different way of doing so, but he was too new to it. What he could do—and what he did do, almost without thought, responding to the horror in Gina’s voice—was pull hard on the surging silver energy.

It took a path Morag had shown him that morning, streaming into a spiral that flattened and descended, locking over the combatants on the edge of the garden. They froze.

“No one’s moving,” Gina said. “And their magic is gone. There’s no golden glow.”

“The magic isn’t gone.” Lewis concentrated on the tarnished silver energy. “I’ve collected it.”

“This is you?”

“I can hold the stasis while we see what we’ve got,” he said.

She put her binoculars on a crate, too carefully. He’d rattled her. “You’re really containing eleven mages?”

“Yes. But you’ll need to deal with your family if they turn up. I’d rather no one saw this.”

“Wise man.” His touch of humor seemed to have reassured her if she could answer with matching irony. “I’ll phone them.” She started towards the deathtrap steep stairs. “Damn. The phone’s out. Internet down…” She halted. “Could it be a coordinated attack? At Morag’s I was dealing with an intense, multi-player assault on the false identity that I used to maintain the two chatrooms where my teenage identity fled to.”

He nudged her gently forward. “The Group of 5 is adept at misdirection. Either the cyber-attack or this one, or something else altogether, was the real goal and the rest distraction. But if you were online actively fending of pursuit while they’d shut down the network here on Cape Cod, then they’ll have to rethink their belief that you’re the hacker pursuing them. This could work for us. It enables you to slip out of the situation. And for that reason.” He blocked Gina at the kitchen door. “Think twice about accompanying me out to where the guardians and the hired combat mages can identify you.”

She pushed at his shoulder, her magic opening the kitchen door. “My home. My fight.”

“Your decision.” He stepped aside.

Gina struggled to control her shock. Her life had always been a quiet one. A hotel could get riotous at midnight on New Year’s Eve, but she’d never been in the thick of a fight before. She’d never been the focus of violence.

And yet, the threat of the Group of 5 was not what had her rattled.

Lewis was oh so casually containing the magic of eleven high-powered mages. He didn’t even seem to be concentrating hard to do it.

Was this the true Deeper Path? Not travelling the galaxy as her aunt did and as Gina had dreamed of for so long, but altering the nature of reality on Earth? Gina had a faint glimpse of why Morag said her people were sworn not to interfere. The Deeper Path was a radical break with humanity’s current existence.

It was a potential that Lewis had to bear responsibility for.

He had enough burdens, but she and Morag had put this one on him: near limitless power.

Gina shivered despite the warmth of the sun as they skirted her berry patch and crossed the protective wards at the edge of her land. Here they were on open woodland.

The eleven mages frozen in stasis stood among the rough grass and low trees. Only the humans were stilled. A rabbit made a mad dash for her neighbor’s distant house. Gina recognized Bunny Babe. The poor thing was a committed escape artiste, but had probably been traumatized by all the magic being thrown around. At any rate, the white floppy-eared rabbit was galumphing for home.

“Kora, explain to me what’s happening here.” Lewis released the four guardians from their stasis.

The commander of the guardians didn’t answer him. She stumbled and caught at the frozen arm of the mage she’d been fighting. “He isn’t moving.” That seemed the extent of her contribution. The fluid strength that characterized a fighter was all locked up in her in shock, and possibly, fear.

But others were more than willing to fill the silence. Too willing. “My magic is gone.” The guardian was probably Gina’s age, but terror made him look ten years older. He looked wildly at Lewis. “You said, everyone said, your magic burned out.”

“It did.”

“But you did this.” The man’s voice was too high. “There’s no one else. You’ve taken my magic.”

The oldest of the guardians strode over to the hysterical one and shoved him down to sit on the dirt. “Head between your knees so you don’t faint.” The white-haired veteran looked at Lewis.

Lewis nodded to him. “Thanks, Sven.”

“Are you holding our magic?” Kora asked tensely. “Is it through our oath-ties to the Collegium? But that wouldn’t work on these.” She released the arm of the frozen mage. “How?”

“Commander,” Lewis snapped. “I asked you a question. Why are you here?”

She opened her mouth, closed it.

Sven answered in her place. “After you sent back the graduate guardian with a fire mage prisoner and a bump on the head, Kora wanted to know what was happening here. She phoned you, got no answer, then the internet connection went down for the whole of Cape Cod. After that nothing would stop her but that she had to speak with you. At least she brought back-up.”

“Did Aunt Emmaline let you through the portal?” Gina asked. She couldn’t imagine Emmaline responding well to Kora’s arrogant manner.

“A kid named Riaz let us through.” Sven’s bright blue eyes assessed her. “He said as how your new boyfriend was making for some interesting visitors through the portal.” Sven’s rumbly voice went even drier as he looked at Lewis. “These seven apparently used the portal, telling the kid that they were Collegium guardians.”

Gina winced. “Riaz is still learning.”

“Not his fault,” Lewis said.

“Nope,” Sven agreed. “But when Riaz mentioned the ‘other’ guardians, we hightailed it here to find them thwarted by the house wards. They’re some of the strongest I’ve ever seen.”

Gina liked the respect in his voice.

Kora didn’t. “Seven of those mages—some of the most infamous magical mercenaries in the world—wouldn’t have been kept out for long.”

Sven shrugged. “Didn’t matter. They saw us and turned their frustrations loose on a target more than willing to fight back. We’ve been brawling an hour.” A pause. “I thought we’d attract your attention earlier.”

“We were busy,” Lewis said absently, frowning at the seven frozen mages.

No one could guess what he was thinking and no one interrupted his thoughts. In fact, the four guardians looked at him with the fascination of rabbits facing a snake. Well, no, Sven didn’t. He seemed just as curious about Gina before his attention shifted to the seven frozen mages. If Kora was right and these were infamous magical mercenaries, then Sven, at least, had functioning priorities. When Lewis released the combat mages from stasis, someone would need to contain them.

Gina felt for the magic coiled in her center. Her house witchery was as jangled and uncertain as she herself. She tried to listen to the sounds of home: the ocean; the closer scratchy noise of crickets; distant human voices; and, the wind through the pine trees, a gentle soughing.

The crows that roosted in the crooked pine tree returned to its shady branches and uttered inquiring caws and what sounded like rude, ruffled-feather comments.

Finally, Lewis stretched, rolled his neck, and looked at Gina. “I’d like your report on everything you’ve found out about the Group of 5, including today’s cyber-attack on your false digital identity. We now have these seven hired mages and the fire mage from earlier as proof of the group’s existence and malicious purpose. The Collegium is going after the Group of 5.”

“The group of who?” Kora asked.

“The people who hired these combat mages, took down the phone network and internet, and last year, tempted me up to the North West Passage for that murderous storm.” He strode back to Gina’s house. “Secure the mages and bring them to the Collegium for questioning.”

“Hey, my magic’s back!” the youngest of the guardians levitated a knife.

Sven snatched the spinning blade out of the air. “So use it to some effect.” He threw the knife at the young man, who abandoned all magic and simply dropped to the ground. The knife hung above him, a gleaming reprimand. “Disarm the mages. Now!”

Two of the mages hired to attack her house rushed at Gina, no longer contained by Lewis’s power. The youngest guardian scrambled up and tackled one. Sven redirected the knife and had it press against the other mercenary mage’s throat—an impressive display of translocation and control.

Gina ran back inside the protection of her home’s wards. “Lewis!”

He halted just outside the kitchen.

She was panting more from adrenaline than the short sprint. “They’ll want to know where you got your magic from. Will you tell them about Morag?”

“The dragon has the right to announce her own presence, or not. I intend to tell the Collegium the truth. On the far side of burned out magic is a different way of seeing the world’s possibilities.”

“Will they believe something so vague?” She was doubtful. People resisted change and new discoveries. Worse, they suspected those who discovered them.

He looked back towards where he’d contained the magic and movement of eleven mages. “They’ll find disbelief remarkably difficult to maintain.”

“People can be stubborn,” she persisted. Did he realize that this display of power would isolate him even more?

“I’m aware.” It was as if he read her mind and answered her worry. Bleakness darkened his brown eyes to the color of old coffee grounds, bitter and discarded. “I am president of the Collegium until the restructure is complete and the Group of 5 defeated. After that, I may need to do as Fay did.” He walked into the house.

Gina stayed outside, staring after him. It took a full minute for her to process what he meant. When she did, she sat down abruptly on the kitchen step.

Fay was Faith Olwen, the powerful former guardian who had broken her oath ties to the Collegium before saving it from demonic infiltration. But the point was, Fay had broken with the Collegium.

Lewis’s whole life was his identification with the Collegium’s purpose, to serve. Would he really break his oath ties and walk away from it?

She inhaled unsteadily.

Did Lewis intend to pursue the Deeper Path as her aunt Deborah had, vanishing to distant planets?