The Night of the Solstice (19 page)

Charles felt cold, but at the same time he was overcome by a sort of horrible fascination.

“It … just … might … work,” said Janie.

Everyone considered.

Everyone looked at everyone else.

Everyone let out a long breath and slowly nodded.

“We're going to jail,” Charles whispered then.

“I know.”

“And—we might be killed. It isn't going to be easy to set a fire that size and get away.”

“I think Claudia should be out of it,” said Janie.

Claudia didn't even blink. “If you're in it, I'm in it.”

“We need gasoline,” said Alys. “We'll siphon some out of the cars before we go tonight. And we need a fuse.”

A bitter smile touched Charles's lips. “The police accused us of playing with firecrackers. I'll give them firecrackers. I've got some Tijuana
speciales
under my bed.”

“The kind that blow your hand off?”

“Oh, Janie. We're probably going to get our heads blown off doing this. What's a hand more or less?”

At quarter to twelve that night they were sitting in the dry brush on the hill by Morgana's house waiting for the moon to rise, just as they had the night they made the amulet. They all wore the amulet at their necks now, as a sort of symbol.

It had been ridiculously easy to climb out their windows and leave the house. Their parents were exhausted after a long day of watching them.

Alys and Charles made precise adjustments in the positioning of the gasoline cans and wads of paper, while Claudia watched with enormous eyes. Only
Janie did not participate. She was sitting, chin in hands, gazing unwaveringly at the distant hills where the moon would soon appear. Her face was set and unhappy, but behind the unmoving exterior her brain was running like the insides of a precision watch—which is to say, she thought, in circles.

Janie was a perfectionist. She found the idea of burning down Fell Andred distasteful and untidy. It wasn't the elegant solution. And so even as a silver haze heralded the coming of moonrise she searched frantically for another answer.

The elegant solution, she thought, was to do what they had set out to do in the beginning, to find Morgana. Sherlock Holmes or even Hercule Poirot would have been able to deduce exactly where the sorceress was without ever leaving his armchair. But then, their brains weren't half-asleep.

For that was how Janie felt, as if for weeks she'd been wandering around half-conscious, unable to see the larger perspective. It was because she'd been so afraid of sorcery in the beginning, terrified of the kind of magic she'd heard about in fairy tales, where
things happened at random, without rhyme or reason, uncontrollable, unpredictable.

But Weerul magic wasn't like that. The Wildworld sorcery obeyed rules, even if the rules were strange and fantastic. It had a beautiful order all its own … and Janie ought to be able to understand it.

Staring at the sliver of white which appeared at the top of the foothills, she put her fists to her temples and tried to
think.

So many things about Fell Andred had bothered her, so many little things didn't seem to fit—but she couldn't quite make sense of them, and there was so little time. Disjointed fragments of thought rushed past her. The night they'd made the amulet, when they had found that no mirror could be moved from the house. The night she had gone through the double mirrors to rescue the others from Aric. The fight with Elwyn—

Oh, it was no good! With a sharp sound of frustration she shook her head, wishing wildly, illogically, that she were a sorceress like Thia Pendriel. Morgana was somewhere in the castle, Janie felt sure of that, and if they could only work the proper spell they
could simply
look
through the mirrors and find her. That is, they could find her as long as …

A long, wondering breath escaped Janie's lips, and as the full moon separated itself from the hill it shone upon her transfigured face.

That was it. That was the answer.

Alys was at the door, gasoline can in hand.

“Alys, Charles, put those down.”

“What?”

“You're not going to need them.”

“What?”

“I know where Morgana is.”

Suddenly she felt as light as air. She got up and walked, or floated, to the house, passing Alys and Charles and not looking back to see if they were following her. She knew they were.

“Janie, what are you saying? Answer me, blast it! Where are you going?”

Janie swept through the living room, drawing the others behind her as a comet draws its tail of fire. She led them to the east wing, to the second floor, to Morgana's bedchamber, and she pointed to the
smaller of the two large mirrors in the alcove.

“That one, I think.”

“Janie, are you crazy? You went through that mirror yourself!”

“So I did,” said Janie, smiling, as she gently lifted the mirror away from the wall. Carrying it before her like a shield she walked back into the corridor.

“Where are you
going
?”

With her immediate family skidding behind her, Janie entered the barren nursery.

Alys was frustrated, bewildered, and furious. “But there isn't even a mirror … in here… .” Her voice trailed off as Janie hung the mirror on the nail which had caught her hair yesterday.

“There is now,” said Janie, simply, and stepped through.

There was an instant when all three of the others stood frozen; then, with one accord, they leapt forward to follow, as if released by a spring.

They were so quick, in fact, that they were in time to witness Morgana's first reaction.

“You fools!” she cried, aiming a blow at Janie, which, had it connected, would have laid her rescuer out flat on the floor. “You dolts! You incompetent, beetle-brained numbskulls, is this the best you could do?” She was no taller than Janie, and her gray eyes flashed fire.

“W-we did our best,” gasped Alys, thunderstruck.

“Your best!”

“I … we thought you'd be grateful—”

“Grateful? Grateful? Do you realize the mirrors will open on the Stillworld in fifty-seven minutes? What in the name of Beldar makes you think I can save you under such outrageous conditions?”

“Possibly,” said a dry little voice near the floor, “the fact that they have it on very good authority that you are the best.”

“Oh, you're safe!” cried Claudia, stumbling forward.

“There will be time for this later,” said the vixen, struggling in Claudia's embrace. “But for now I strongly suggest that you stop ranting, Morgana, and go through that mirror. Why? Because someone is coming up the hallway. Make that several someones.”

“You talk too much,” snarled Morgana, and then the door shattered and Cadal Forge stepped over the rubble and into the room. He saw Morgana and he saw the mirror and then Alys witnessed the most terrifying thing she had seen in her life. Cadal Forge
focused.
His head whipped back toward Morgana and in his crystal gray eyes there was no longer any trace of abstracted brooding. The entire force of his tremendous will was focused on
now.
Alys reeled.

Morgana, shouting something, dodged into the mirror. But before anyone else could move, the midnight-gowned Thia Pendriel swept forward and touched the mirror with her Silver Staff, and it became transparent, showing Morgana's retreating figure. In a twinkling the tall sorceress turned and snatched Claudia up in her arms. With a quick gesture she tore the amulet from Claudia's throat and tossed it through the bars of the window.

“Now,” said Cadal Forge quietly. “To the great hall.”

“Claudia!” screamed Alys.

Charles, although he was having strange and inexplicable visions of himself running down Center Street
to hide in their garage, joined Alys in following the sorcerei. To his infinite disgust, Janie did not, but vaulted through the mirror after the vixen.

Janie was aware of Charles's scathing look as she passed into the human world. She ignored it and scampered after the sorceress.

“You couldn't even be bothered to bring my staff,” said Morgana bitingly as she grabbed something from beside the bedroom fireplace.

Janie, nonplussed, said, “I thought it was a poker.”

In Morgana's hands the black, rusty length of metal which Janie had used to beat Aric turned liquid gold, and shivers of light rippled down its length.

“My instruments!” Scarcely seeming to touch the ground Morgana ran to the cellar and down the stairs.

“Take this, and this, and this.” She thrust bottles into Janie's hands and scanned the shelves for others.

Janie stared at her. She was thinking that no one could have been more unlike Thia Pendriel. The true Mirror Mistress was as small as a child and her hair fell in a dark cloud to her shoulders. She wore a plain
amber-colored robe, gathered at the waist with a wide jeweled belt. At her throat was a heavy gold necklace whose center was a pouch of green silk.

“What are you going to do?” asked Janie.

“Close the mirrors, of course!”

“With the others still in the Wildworld?”

Morgana stopped dead at the sound of Janie's matter-of-fact question. “What?” She looked around the workroom as if expecting to see the other children. “You mean to say they didn't follow?”

Janie told what had happened to Claudia.

“And Alys will never leave her,” she finished. “And neither will Charles—I think.”

There was a drawn-out moment of tension while the sorceress turned to the vixen and stared at her, eye-to-eye, seeming to have some unspoken conversation.

“Damnation!” cried Morgana at last, throwing up her hands. “I may be half Quislai but I'm not indestructible! Did you
see
how many of them there were?”

The vixen's whiskers quivered. “I always thought,” she replied coldly, “that the other half was human.”

There was another pause, and then suddenly Morgana was moving again, pulling other bottles from the shelves, her small hands darting with an almost savage deftness as she mixed ingredients.

“Here!” She dashed the mixture into a clean yellow cloth, twisted it, and thrust it into Janie's hands. “The vixen will tell you what to do with this. I'm going to need all the help I can get.”

“I thought you were the best,” said Janie mildly.

The woman threw her a glance that would have frozen flame in the heart of Hades. “Human infant,” she said between her teeth, “our enemies have had three hundred years to prepare themselves for this moment. I have had three minutes. In addition to which I am half a millennium out of practice. I never asked to be the greatest sorceress since Darion Beldar. Now get out of my way, or finish life as a pile of cinders.”

Janie obeyed, and she was gone.

“You need a censer for that,” said the vixen briskly. “Don't ask why. There is one on that lower shelf.”

Janie scrambled among the dusty instruments. Her fingers longed for the lightning deftness of Morgana's.

“What's in the cloth?”

“Incendiary powder. Scatter it to scatter your enemies. Morgana mixes a particularly virulent variety. Unfortunately it must be prepared in small amounts and she had time to make but a little.”

Janie found the censer, an ornate gold vessel with holes on all sides, something like a tea strainer hung from chains. “Is there more to the spell than what she did? Because I saw the ingredients and the proportions. And I wonder what would happen if you added just a pinch of phoenix feathers… .”

Alys and Charles stumbled desperately after the sorcerei to the west wing. No one took any notice of them, except one sorcerer who glanced at Charles in absent contempt and with a casual gesture sent him sprawling.

“Now I'm mad,” muttered Charles, picking himself up and wiping blood from his nose. “Now I'm incensed.”

“We can't let them have Claudia!” panted Alys.

Just then she reached the second-floor gallery above the great hall, and halted in shock. There had been half a dozen strange sorcerei with Cadal Forge. But in the hall below were easily three dozen more, and every one of them held a staff. The Society had gathered.

An atmosphere of mounting expectation pervaded
the enormous room, but no one seemed either anxious or hurried. The sorcerei were tall, with proud faces and elegant, disciplined bodies. Power, and knowledge of power, showed in their every movement. They wore rich robes of many colors: cerulian blue and mandrake green, purple, dove gray, and russet. All eyes were turned on Cadal Forge, who effortlessly dominated this august group by his very presence.

The master sorcerer in his plain soldier's clothes stood near the dais, arms folded, staff in one hand. But despite the apparent ease of his manner Alys could see that he was still
focused
, like a sleeper at last fully awakened.

Suddenly a murmur swelled in the crowd, as the great dais mirror shivered into color. The next moment Morgana herself stood on the platform, her hands empty, tightly clasped.

Her eyes swept the formidable crowd of sorcerei, and when they reached Cadal Forge he made her a very slight bow, as if to say “Voilà.” When she located Thia Pendriel, her other great enemy, the councillor expressionlessly lifted Claudia into sight. Morgana's
eyes narrowed and her mouth went grim. She turned back toward Cadal Forge, drawing breath, but, unexpectedly, she addressed the room as a whole.

“Members of the Society for a New Order in a New World,” she said, and then paused before continuing weightily and softly, “you are being used. This man”—she gestured toward Cadal Forge without looking at him—“has told you that he wants to restore the Golden Age of Findahl, to establish an order where each of you can rule without the interference of the Council. He lies. He cares nothing about a new order. He'd just as soon see every one of you dead—including you, Aric Carpalith. All he wants is the slaughter of the Stillfolk. He wants to wallow in the blood of his personal enemies, and when that is accomplished,
believe me
, the rest of you can go and hang yourselves.”