Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (37 page)

No, it was not another effort by Winn to animate the darkness. It was my old friend, the
Gwrach y Rhibyn
, ugly, long-clawed, and dark as always—and it looked mad enough to chew swords.

Well, it had, after all, predicted my death weeks ago, and I was still very much alive. From what I recalled.
Gwrach y Rhibyn
sometimes fulfilled its own prophecies if they weren’t coming true fast enough. I held White Hilt between us, but the creature made no hostile move. Instead, it looked at me with its piercing eyes and wailed, as if it were me, “My friends! All my friends!”—a clear prophecy of the death of everyone who had joined me on this quest.

White Hilt flashed, and with one good swing I lopped off its head, which thudded onto the roof and rolled a bit. Its body shuddered, then dropped emptily, its neck still burning a little from White Hilt’s fire.

“Oh, shut up!” I muttered as I pushed myself forward.

“Come back here!” yelled Carrie Winn, once again through thunder. “If you don’t, I’ll awaken the rest of your party before you can reach me with that damned sword.”

She had guessed my strategy and my psychology. I was no more able now than I had been a few minutes ago to let more of my friends suffer. I turned back toward her and walked slowly in her direction, giving myself time to make sure there was nothing I was overlooking.

Winn seemed to have used some of her renewed energy to charm my nearby friends to sleep. Nurse Florence and Dan, for instance, were both out cold, though thankfully Dan was breathing normally, so Nurse Florence had gotten his wound healed. The band members and the people who had donated their energy to the earlier battle had all fallen more or less where they stood, too tired to have much hope of resisting a sleep spell. I think Carlos had been knocked out earlier when he got blown off his feet. Shar, even if awake, was only partially healed when Nurse Florence had had to switch to Dan, so I doubted very much that he would be able to intervene. I thought I could hear Gordy talking to Stan, so Gordy might have been out of range when Winn cast the spell, but he wasn’t exactly working at one hundred percent of his normal fighting capacity either, and anyway his presence was maybe the only thing holding Stan together, so it was just as well if he stayed with him. I assumed Vanora was doing the same for Carla, and better she also kept doing what she was doing.

In the end, I guess I always knew it would come down to me and Winn.

And I guess I knew I probably wasn’t going to make it.

No, I didn’t have a martyr complex, and I certainly wasn’t suicidal. But, except for my parents, practically everyone I really cared about was right there, on that roof. What would you have done? Let them all die? Probably not.

The closer I got to the altar, the more I could hear the screaming, presumably echoes of the victims sacrificed on it for God knows how many millenniums. The cacophony was almost more than I could bear, but I knew I had to keep thinking clearly.

“Your oath?” I said as she kept motioning me forward.

“I swear not to awaken anyone else here. Now, come here! I grow impatient.”

“Swear not to harm any of them and to let them go, or there is no deal.”

She looked at me disdainfully. “Okay, have it your way—there’s no deal!” Before I could react, she hit me with a sleep charm on steroids. I resisted falling asleep, but the unexpected attack stunned me. Already shaky, I dropped to my knees, and White Hilt clattered to the ground, its flames winking out. Belatedly, I realized I should have handled things differently, but it was too late now.

I would die—and everyone else would die, too. I would die for nothing.

I reached for White Hilt, but a shoe painfully crushed my hand against the surface of the roof. Looking up, I saw that Winn had evidently summoned a couple of the shifters she had been holding in reserve to take our places after she had killed us. The battle over, she must have decided she could risk bringing a couple of them out.

They dragged me to my feet and then toward the altar. I struggled, but my attempts were far too feeble to be more than a minor annoyance to them. I started to sing, and predictably one of them smashed me in the mouth. I should have been getting used to that by now.

Before I knew it, they were tying me spread eagle on the altar and ripping open my shirt.

Though the altar was stone, I could feel it pulsing hungrily beneath me, waiting to drink my blood. By now the screaming was deafening.

I suddenly became aware of Carrie Winn looking down at me.

“Pity you didn’t let me bed you,” she said, brushing her hand across my chest with surprising gentleness and sounding almost wistful. “Well, no time now, I’m afraid. It is almost midnight. Gwion Bach, it is at last time for you to pay back what you owe me.”

Gwion Bach?

Finally I realized who Carrie Winn was.

CHAPTER 21: BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Gwion Bach was one of the few lives I could not remember clearly. I had read the stories; hell, I had read every word about my earlier lives I could find. But in the case of Gwion Bach, the stories seemed just that: stories, too mythical to be true, even in a universe in which magic existed.

Yet here was the artifact I now recognized as the cauldron of inspiration, where the witch Ceridwen had brewed the great potion, the first three drops of which would grant wisdom and poetic inspiration. Ceridwen had planned to give those three drops to Morfran, her incredibly ugly son, as a way of compensating for his ugliness. Unfortunately, she had a boy named Gwion Bach continuously stirring the potion, and he inadvertently splashed it on himself. Reflexively, he licked his burned thumb, in the process drinking the three precious drops. According to the story, Ceridwen pursued Gwion, presumably to find some way of undoing what he had done. However, he had already figured out from his new knowledge how to shape-shift, and so Ceridwen pursued him from form to form, until at last he tried to hide as a single grain of corn, and she became a hen and swallowed him. (You can see why I had trouble swallowing this story—pun intended.) As often happens in Celtic tales, after swallowing something strange, Ceridwen found herself pregnant. She knew the unborn child must be Gwion Bach, and she resolved to kill him, but when he was born, she did not have the heart to. She did have the heart to sew him in a bag and throw him in the ocean, though. Go figure! Anyway, as often happens in myth, he did not die, but was found on the coast of Wales by a prince, Elffin ap Gwyddno, who named the child Taliesin and raised him as his own.

Yup, Gwion Bach was me, though I still couldn’t remember that life. Clearly, though, Carrie Winn could remember, and at least the potion of wisdom part of the story must be true; the presence of the cauldron confirmed that much.

Except for those of you who can’t figure out a book without
SparkNotes
by your side, I’m sure you have realized by now that Carrie Winn was Ceridwen (the witch in the story, not the Wiccan goddess of the same name.)

I tried hard not to dwell on the fact that Ceridwen, who was in at least one sense my mother, had been trying to have sex with me just a few weeks ago. Yuck! Way too Oedipal for my tastes.

“So, what’s the plan, Mom?” I asked, my voice dripping with sarcasm, trying to sound disdainful in a desperate and probably not completely successful effort to cover up the fear clawing at my heart. Okay, so this might not have been the best time for sarcasm, but I was already tied to a bloody altar vibrating with the screams of its previous victims, my chest bared for the knife. I doubted I would have ended up playing Canasta with her no matter what tone I used.

“You always were a saucy one, Gwion—at least in any of your lives in which I have encountered you. Well, the plan is simple. Apparently, the cauldron of inspiration cannot produce another potion as long as its previous recipient still lives.”

“The original Taliesin died 1500 years ago or so.”

“Yes, you did, but you kept reincarnating, and the cauldron somehow knew you were out there, even when you yourself had forgotten the incredible knowledge that you possess.” Behind her the two shifters had lit a fire under the cauldron and started stirring.

“I have been waiting all these centuries for a way to separate you from the knowledge you stole. I had a spell that should have done the trick, but I tried it and failed more than once. I finally realized that you need to not only have that knowledge but remember it. The spell for awakening your past lives took years to perfect, and several people I tested it on died. Eventually I found a way to cast the spell without killing the target. Even so, I couldn’t get the spell to work on young children, so I had to wait until you started puberty.”

“You’ve been watching me for four years?” I asked. The thought made my skin crawl. I thought she had only been aware of me since Stan broke my
tynged.
For the first time, I began to question that whole idea. Where had I gotten the notion of a
tynged
requiring secrecy in the first place? Could Ceridwen have planted it in my mind herself as a way of keeping me isolated? Perhaps.

“Silly boy. I have been watching you since you were born. One of the advantages of the wealth I amassed over the centuries is the resources it affords me to keep track of you each time you reincarnate. Those resources also built a town I knew was just perfect to attract your parents, so I could keep you in one place and close to me without arousing suspicion.” I must have looked incredulous at that point. “Don’t underestimate your importance, or rather, your wisdom’s importance. Yes, Santa Brígida was built as a trap for your family, built from hints I drew from their own minds in various ways.”

Santa Brígida was based on what my parents wanted? Damn, and I thought my mom at least had better taste!

“We’ll be ready in a few more minutes, Ms. Winn,” said the shifter stirring the cauldron.

“So, what does this spell involve?” I asked, doing a pretty good job of keeping my voice steady.

“I won’t bore you with all the details. The key part of the ritual involves cutting your heart from your chest and throwing it, still beating, into the cauldron, then casting a powerful spell amplified by your blood running onto this very ancient altar.”

“Just killing me in some more mundane way wouldn’t do it?” Damn, my voice cracked a little on that one.

“I’m afraid not, Gwion. There is that pesky reincarnation to think about. You see, the best part about this spell is that it traps your soul in the cauldron. No reincarnation. No cozy Episcopalian heaven. No sipping apple juice with the old gang in Avalon. Whatever you might have expected after death won’t happen. Just one endless stretch in the cauldron, knowing you are trapped but having no way to escape.”

I had steeled myself for death, but now the adrenalin numbness was wearing off, and I had not expected to be condemned to some kind of claustrophobic hell inside Ceridwen’s cauldron.

I had never been so scared in any of my lives. I started to pull against the ropes, but they were thick and well tied, and I was exhausted anyway. Ceridwen laughed at my pathetic efforts.

“Ah, not as brave as you thought? I knew it all along. You were a coward as Gwion Bach, you were a coward as Taliesin, hiding behind Arthur’s warriors and singing your songs, you were a coward more than once when I caught up with you in other lives. Crying, begging, pleading. I thought maybe this time would be different, but I guess not.”

Abruptly someone nearby started cursing Ceridwen in fluent Italian. The tone was very different from what I was used to, but the voice had to be Carla’s. She was coming up rapidly, and I had been right about the magic. I could feel her power even through the frenzied outbursts of the altar.

I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or horrified. Carla seemed to have bounced back faster than I could have hoped. Except it wasn’t Carla. A possible danger in pulling oneself together after an awakening is that a past life personality stronger than your present life one might be in charge. There were a few days when I literally was Taliesin 1. He relinquished control in the end, but a more determined, less ethical past self might theoretically stay in control for a whole lifetime. The personality controlling Carla’s body at the moment was very strong from what little I could tell. On the other hand, it did seem to be listening to present-day Carla. I knew Italian well enough to know whoever Carla was at the moment was trying to defend me.

If Carla was up and around, surely Vanora was about to pop up. From my admittedly limited view, it looked as if Ceridwen and two shifters were the only enemies around, though I knew there were a few more in the house. If I could get free, though, there might still be hope.

Under normal circumstances, someone operating at Carla’s power level would have given Ceridwen pause, but unlike Ceridwen, the person controlling Carla hadn’t been steadily researching magic for hundreds of years. Whoever it was was not necessarily less powerful than Ceridwen, but definitely less skillful.

Really, the battle was over before it began. Ceridwen raised her hand and cast what I realized with horror was the awakening spell.

What had Vanora said? “I don’t think you could have survived a second shot of a spell that powerful.” Well, if I couldn’t, how was Carla going to do it?

I screamed and thrashed, another pathetic display, but Carla hit the ground with a sickening thud, perhaps dead, perhaps just broken beyond repair. I almost passed out at that point. (Yeah, screaming and fainting, just the sort of things heroic deeds are made from.) However, I was dimly aware of Vanora starting to attack Ceridwen, and then realizing Carla’s plight and becoming distracting by it. Silence fell too quickly. At best Vanora was unconscious. At worst, she too was dead.

“Is it time?” said Ceridwen in obvious impatience.

“Two more minutes,” replied one of the shifters.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t due to rush. My, Gwion, you do have a surprising number of allies for someone trying to hide who he really is.”