Phoenix and Ashes (29 page)

Fortunately,
the Hoar Stones were
not
associated with any May Eve celebrations on
the part of the locals. If anything, they were shunned. Another indication that
this site was exactly what Alison needed.

“You
had better have packed for the walk, as I instructed you,” Alison said,
with a hint of threat in her voice. “Or you’ll find yourself
tottering down the road on whatever shoes you
did
bring. I have need
of you; four is the minimum of participants for these ceremonies. We
aren’t trifling with Beltane rituals of fertility or love-making you
know. The things I plan to awaken need coercing and confining. And to that end,
thank you, Warrick. I appreciate you being willing to participate.”

Her
solicitor looked both surprised and gratified. Well, she didn’t often thank
him, or anyone, for that matter. Not that she intended to start handing out
thanks any more frequently; being sparing with them made them that much more
valuable.

“I
don’t often get to see a Master performing a major ritual,” he
replied, with a nod of thanks. “I’ll certainly learn a lot.”

He
might at that. Not that it would be anything he could actually use. He
wasn’t strong enough for that.

She
had set the first batch of minor Earth Elementals on Reginald’s trail
some time ago—but they had been consistently thwarted by the protections
Devlin Fenyx had set about the manor house itself, powerful protections that
had kept them completely out. Alison had intended them to attack him only when
he was asleep, or in that twilight state between waking and sleeping, when they
would be best able to terrify him, and they had been unable to catch him
sleeping outside the walls of Longacre. Until today.

Apparently
he had drowsed off in the sun somewhere outside this afternoon; her minor
goblins had caught wind of this, and had surrounded him.

Then
something went wrong.

They
weren’t even as bright as pigeons, and she could get nothing out of them
of any real substance, only that Reggie had a protector that had destroyed
several of them and sent the rest fleeing for their lives. She thought it might
be the village witch; the old woman wasn’t really powerful but she was
strong enough to destroy a few minor goblins, and Reggie had been spending a
lot of time down at the Broom pub. And while it wasn’t likely that the
witch would concern herself with something happening up at Longacre, even
Alison could not entirely blame her for interfering with something that
happened in her own personal sphere.

But
that only meant that stronger measures were called for here. As it happened,
the timing could not have been much better. Beltane was an ancient night of
magic; it would be much easier for her to pull through what she needed on May
Eve. There was no light without shadow, and though the traditional magics of
Beltane were those of growth and life, it would be no great strain to bend some
of the solstice power to other paths.

And
in fact, the tradition, though not a British or Celtic one, was already in
place in other parts of the world.

For
every joyous Beltane, there was a terrifying Walpurgisnacht. Samhain would have
been better, of course—the time of waning light, and of death, rather
than rebirth—but any of the greater pagan festivals would do for her
purposes, for every one that celebrated light had the counterpart that celebrated
the shadow.

The
sun was going down now; soon enough it would be time to slip out of the
inn—probably the best time would be while people were coming and going
from the bar—and begin the walk to the hoar stones.

“Time
to change and gather our things,” she declared, leveling a look at the
girls that warned them that tonight she would tolerate no nonsense. She and
Warrick left the two to follow her orders, while they went to their own rooms.

Any
other time she would not have allowed herself to be caught dead in trousers;
this, however, was an occasion for the deliberate perversion of society’s
norms, and she clothed herself in sturdy walking shoes, men’s pants, and
a warm jumper, with a long coat to go over it all. She stuffed her hair up into
a workingman’s cap, and picked up the rucksack that she had already
packed. Besides being warm and practical, the outfit had another purpose.
Anyone who saw them on the road would see two men and two women, and assume he
was seeing two courting pairs. He would also think twice about accosting them.

The
girls were not wearing trousers, but they
were
clothed all in black,
with sturdy walking-shoes, plain woolen skirts, equally plain shirtwaists and
their oldest coats. Warrick Locke followed their example in being clothed plainly
and in black. He had the other rucksack.

They
slipped out of the inn to discover that night had already fallen. Well, that
was all to the good; they were able to move at a brisk walk to the south and
east, heading for their goal a mile and a half away.

The
moon gave enough light to walk by, and though there were one or two May Eve
bonfires in the distance, these were a fraction of the number that used to
blossom before the war. Another thing the war was good for—with most, if
not all, of the young men across the Channel, the kind of May Eve celebrations
that ended in couples and unattached young girls scattered across the landscape
to see the sun rise on May Day were probably not taking place this year at all.

Why
bother to wash your face in May dew to make yourself beautiful? For whom? The
septuagenarian shepherd? The Land Girls?

The
boy you’d once giggled over who’d come home without arms or legs or
wits? If your lover was still alive and whole, he was probably in the trenches
tonight, and would not be home for months, if he ever came home at all. And if
he did—

It
might have been better for him if he had died.

Alison
could taste some of that anguish in the air this night, but it did not come
from the area of the few bonfires. It came from the cottages, where lights were
going out; May Eve was just another night, and May Day would bring nothing good
except, perhaps, a few early strawberries, a few flowers.

Alison
kept her ears open for the sounds of other footsteps in the fields, but heard
nothing but owls and sleepy sheep, and the unhappy mutterings of her own
footsore offspring.

And
as for the few couples left, the men either home on leave, or spared having to
go to the war by infirmity, like Broom’s own Scott Kelsey, with his
collapsed lung—well, they were already coupling in conjugal beds, without
needing to find May Eve bowers for clandestine trysts. Marriages had been and
were being made that would never have been countenanced before the war, some
with babies already in the offing, though by no means most. She’d been
the avid eavesdropper on the end of one of those little cottage dramas, sitting
behind the parents of the prospective groom as pretty Tamara Budd and her
handsome young officer-fiancé stood to have the banns read in church
last Sunday. The groom’s mother was sniveling—overdressed for a
village church-service, and in lamentable taste, the couple was clearly
prosperous enough to have assumed their boy would marry above his class, not
below it. “Quiet, woman!” the husband had hissed.
“She’s not what
you
want, but she’s what
he
wants, and do you want a grandchild to have his name before he’s killed
or don’t you?”

Oh,
those words, and that delicious, delicious despair! People were
saying
now what they had not even dreamed of
thinking
before—not
“if he’s killed,” but “when.” Women sent off
their men with that despair in their hearts, open and acknowledged. And if any
of their men came home at all, no matter how damaged, they thanked God and
thought themselves lucky. Every time the telegraph-girl came riding into Broom
on her bicycle, that despair followed her like the wake of a boat, spreading
through all the village until she brought her anticipated, but dreaded burden
of bad news to her destined door. There was no other reason for a telegraph to
be sent to anyone in Broom except for the most dreaded of reasons.
“Killed in action.” “Missing in action” (which was the
other way of saying “blown to bits and we can’t find enough of him
to identify”). “Wounded and dying.”

And
every time the telegraph-girl entered Broom, Alison knew it, and reveled in
that wash of fear and anguish. She’d even sent a telegraph or two to
herself, when deaths were few, just to trigger it, and the power it unleashed.
For all the inconveniences that the war had brought,
this
was worth
it, and if only it could go on for three, four, five more years—

She
made a mental note to strengthen those demons of illness she had sent to
America. Not tonight, but soon. The longer the war lasted, the greater her
power would be.

There
was no traffic tonight; none at all, not even when they passed through Enstone
itself. Not a foot-traveler, not a cart, certainly not an auto. There was some
small activity around the pub, two men going in as they passed the first houses
in the village, but no one came out during the time they were on the Enstone to
Ditchely road. Not that she had expected any fellow travelers, but she was
pleased that things were so quiet.

Alison
had an electric torch, but she didn’t use it; she was navigating by the
“feel” of things, rather than looking for landmarks. After a bit
less than an hour of the four of them plodding down the uneven road between the
high hedgerows, she began to sense what she was watching for, southwards, off
to the side of the road, a sluggish, stagnant pool of power that had not been
tapped in a very long time.

“Watch
for a gap in the hedge to the right,” she ordered. “It will
probably be a stile going over, but there might actually be a path.”

But
it was the crossing road that they saw first, and only after looking closely
for it, found not only a stile but a path, off to the right.

Both
hedge and stile were in poor repair, as reported by Warrick Locke, who went
over first. Now Alison used her torch; the last thing any of them needed was to
be lamed by a sprained ankle at this point!

The
path lay along the line and under the shelter of another hedge, but now it was
clear to Alison where their goal was, and a tingle of anticipation made her
want to hurry the others towards that wooded enclosure whose trees shielded
imperfectly the glow of power that roused sullenly at her presence.

The
enclosure was little more than a couple of wooden railings; they went over and
pushed through the holly and other undergrowth to arrive at her goal.

It
stood upon a small mound, an arrangement of six stones forming the remains of
what had once been a large, chambered structure. A tomb, perhaps; at least,
that was what the old men she had questioned in Enstone had said it was, the
tomb of an ancient tribal chieftain long dead before the Romans came. She
didn’t much care; two powerful ley lines ran through it, and it had been
made other use of for some time after its former occupant had been looted away
by Romans searching for British gold. The largest of the stones was a good nine
feet tall.

She
wedged her torch where it could best illuminate the interior of the tomb, and
set Warrick and the girls to making the place ready, while she slipped out of
sight long enough to don her robe. She usually didn’t bother with ritual
robes, but this was too important and dangerous a ceremony to leave anything to
chance. Besides, the things she intended to call might not recognize her
authority without her robes. When she re-entered the tomb, Warrick had already
gotten the altar-cloth laid out on the ground, and had lit candles and stuck
them wherever he could, to save the batteries on the torch. The others’
modern clothing would have looked very out-of-place if they had not worn simple
black. Instead of being glaring anachronisms, they looked like minor acolytes
of no particular order.

The
candles, stuck in places sheltered from the breeze, flickered very little.
Alison was struck by how timeless the scene seemed. There was nothing to tell
that this was 1917—or 1017—or even the first century Anno Domini.

“Take
your places,” she said, and took her short-sword from the rucksack. It
was a genuine Celtic relic, of bronze, and had been the means that ended more
than a dozen lives before it had been left in a tomb very like this one. Locke
took a candle and stood in the east, Carolyn in the south, and Lauralee in the
west. Alison reserved the north, the most important in this ceremony, for
herself. When the others were in place, she took the bronze blade in her hands
and cut a circle of protection and power around all of them, moving widdershins
as she did so. It was a little crowded in the tomb, for the space inside it
could not have been more than eight feet across, but when she was done, the
light from the candles faded into insignificance as the interior sprang to
life, the stones themselves glowing a dull ochre with pent-up power. She took
her place in the north, and nodded at Locke to begin.

Locke
looked excited; the girls, wide-eyed.

“I
guard the East in the name of Loki, the malicious, the betrayer,” Locke
said, raising his candle to the level of his eyes. “In his name do I call
the power of Air.”

The
candle flared, its flame turning blue, to confirm that Locke had made all the
right occult connections. He grinned at Alison, but she was already turning and
nodding to Carolyn, who was raising her candle.

“I
guard the South in the name of Hecate, the Queen of Witches, the bringer of
burning plague, of drought and despair,” Carolyn said carefully, her
voice sounding higher than usual and a bit strained, her eyes glinting at her
mother over the flame of the candle. “In her name do I call the power of
Fire.”