Phoenix and Ashes (30 page)

As
Carolyn’s candle-flame burned the crimson of blood, Alison was already
turning to Lauralee. Other than her own part, this would be the trickiest.

“I
guard the West in the name of Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, Mist on the
Lake, the eater of hearts,” Lauralee said, very carefully, without
tripping even a little on the difficult name. “In his name do I call the
power of Water.”

Alison’s
triumph tasted sweet as the candle-flame flared green; it had been a risk,
using that foreign deity—but she had wanted something uniquely
western
,
and could think of no god more bloodthirsty than one of the ancient Aztecs.

But
now it was her turn. “I guard the North and close the circle in the name
of the Morrigan, Death and Despair, the Storm-Crow, the Blood-Raven, the
goddess of battles and harvester of souls,” she said, holding aloft her
own candle. “In her name do I call the power Earth!”

The
flame of her candle was already yellow—but it flared up like a
pitch-soaked torch, until for a moment it licked the stone above their heads
before subsiding. She didn’t need that sign to know that she had tapped
into the power sleeping uneasily here in the stones, however; to her senses the
place practically hummed, and as the stones increased their glow, you could
have read by the light that they shed.

The
four of them bent as one to secure their candles in saucers at the four edges
of the altar-cloth, then rose again.

And
Alison began her chant.

It
predated Christianity, this chant; the stones here recognized it, as did the
power within those stones. The stones vibrated in sympathy with it, and the
power leapt to serve. It was an old chant designed to serve, protect, and
avenge those who were great in power but few in numbers. With this magic, they
did not have to muster an army. With this magic, the army would come of its
own.

An
army of the dead.

Not
ghosts or spirits called from some afterlife, but
revenants
, the
emotionally charged remnants of the unquiet dead still bound to earth by their
own will, the executed, defeated in battle, murdered. Any whose remains were
interred in the earth, whose deaths had not brought peace, but anger and pain,
who were not at all ready to
move on
—

On
this night when the doors to the spirit-world were cast open, they came, from
every direction they came, from hallowed and unhallowed ground, from unmarked
grave, from crossroad-burial, from forgotten forest mound they came. Ancient, merely
old, and new, they came, singly, then by dozens. They came on the wings of
hate, of anger, and of despair. They pressed in upon the shield of power as the
air outside it grew thick with their restless spirits, until the pressure
outside the shield threatened to crack it. There were so many that they merged
into a circling miasma from which only an occasional glimpse of ghostly-glowing
face emerged—here a hairy tribesman, there a close-cropped Roman, here an
arrogant Cavalier, there an equally arrogant Roundhead, here a robed Druid,
there a tonsured monk—faces old as this island, and as new as yesterday.

And
Alison’s chant bound them to the torment of her chosen target, and
painted that target with words that made him the enemy of each of them.

To
the flint-wielding tribesman, he was the effete and sophisticated embodiment of
the end of the
old ways
, a man who no longer hunted his food with
spear and knife, but who spent his nights in
housen
, and tilled the
soil. To the Cavalier, he was the upholder of the way of Parliament. To the
monk he was that horror of horrors, a Protestant—to the Roundhead, he was
a man who paid no more than lip-service to God, who blasphemed and gambled and
sinned the sins of the flesh. To the poor peasant, he was the noble, the
oppressor—to the noble, he was a man who shunned his proper class for the
company of the base-born. To the Roman he was a Saxon, to the Saxon he was a
Norman. To the Druid, he was the servant of the White Christ who put paid to
pagans with fire and sword; to the highwayman, he was the embodiment of the law
that had hung him and the hand that had done the deed. And to the shattered
wreck of the just-buried war-victim, he was the man who had escaped alive,
because he was wealthy, privileged or just plain lucky, when
he
had
not. To the betrayer, to the betrayed, to the killer and the victim, to each of
them, Reggie Fenyx became that which he hated the most. They swirled
widdershins around the shield of protection, faster and faster, pulling in more
and more of the power of this place, the power that would enable
them
to go forth and torment.

So
that in the end, when she uttered the word that freed them and bound them at
the same time (all but those few spirits that still had the ability to
think
as well as
feel
, and had slipped away before she could ensnare them),
no matter what hate had brought them here, the focus for that hate became
Reginald
Fenyx
. She gave them the look, the sense of him; told them without words
where to find him.

This
was why she had chosen so carefully her gods of East, South, West, and North.
Each of them embodied, in his or her own way, the spirit of deception.

She
bound the whirling circle of spirits with a word, and set them free with that
same word, a single syllable that exploded outward, sending them, the deadly
spiritual shrapnel, flying.

The
circle of mist burst apart; the light of the stones went out like a snuffed
candle. And all of it in a strange and echoing silence in which nothing could
be heard but four people breathing as one.

And
with that word, she dropped to her knees, exhausted.

But
the deed was complete. The tomb was empty, the power within it and beneath it
drained. The only glow now came from the guttering candles.

Carolyn
and Lauralee stared at their mother, mouths agape, and shaking. In spite of her
weariness, Alison could not help smiling. She’d never done a Great Work
in their presence. Now perhaps they’d think twice before challenging her.

Warrick
Locke was clearly impressed, but not nearly so cowed. And it was he
who—following her instructions, true—recovered first, and began the
dismissal ceremony, speaking his words and snuffing his candle. Blinking and
uncertain, the two girls followed his lead as Alison got back to her feet
again.

She
snuffed her own candle, then cut the circle rather than going through the
tedious business of uncasting it. With the circle cut, the shield dispersed,
leaving them all standing in the rock-walled tomb, looking—a little
silly. Especially her, in her black velvet, hooded ritual robe.

She
wished now that she had given in to the girls and driven here in the auto.
But—

But
what if someone had seen it here?

On
the other hand, Warrick was looking decidedly chipper…

“Warrick,
could please I prevail upon you to get the motor from the inn and come bring us
back?” she asked, and offered him a smile that promised a great deal more
than she was prepared to give. The Morrigan, the deceiver, was still with her,
it seemed.

Well,
she would let the Morrigan continue to have her way. If he demanded, she would
let him take her to his room, then cast a spell of sleep and self-deception on
him, and let him dream that he had what he wanted. She had strength enough for
that, and even tired, he was no match for her.

Weak-willed
man that he was, Locke saw the promise and leapt for it. Then again, perhaps
Loki was still with him, and thought to trick his way to what he’d never
gotten before. “Of course!” he replied, with a sly smile.
“After all that, I’m not surprised that you’re tired.”

Before
she could say anything else, he was off, leaving her to drag off her robe and
change back into her masculine garb, then join her daughters in waiting for
him. She looked up into the night sky at that waning moon. And smiled. Well,
let him think he had the upper hand. A contest between the Morrigan and Loki
for craft and trickery was no contest.

No
contest at all…

“Mother?”
Carolyn said, timidly. “Were those ghosts?”

“Of
a sort,” she replied. “They are properly called
revenants
,
and they fall under the power of the Earth Master, since they are bound to
earth for—well, for whatever reason. They are the unquiet dead, who never
took the step through the door of the afterlife. Some Earth Masters spend their
entire lives going about freeing such things and sending them on their way
through the door they have been avoiding.”

“Why?”
Lauralee asked.

“Because
some Earth Masters are idiots,” she said, surprising a giggle out of both
of the girls. “It makes about as much sense to me as going out to be a
missionary. Both careers are fraught with hardship and difficulty, and
ultimately in both cases you are dealing with creatures who have little or no
interest in what you are trying to tell them.”

“But
you—you told them what they wanted to hear?” Lauralee hazarded.

Alison
smiled. Well, it looked as if at least one of the girls had inherited
some
of her intelligence. “That is how you bind them to
your
target
instead of their own,” she explained. “After all, most of the time
the target of their hatred is as dead as they are, and generally has more sense
than to linger. You tell them how
your
target represents everything
they hate. Then you give them enough power to do what they want, and turn them
loose.”

“Can
they break through the protections on Longacre?” Carolyn wanted to know.

“Some
might. But even if they don’t they are powerful enough to force Reggie to
see them, awake or asleep.” She sighed with content. This had truly been
a job well done. “We’ll let them torment him for a while, and use
up all that extra power I gave them. Then you’ll move in.”

“But
how will we banish
ghosts
?” Carolyn cried. “We can’t
even make a simple love-charm work on him!”

“Ah—”Alison
laid a finger aside her nose and nodded. “There’s the beauty of it.
Once they use up that extra power I gave them, the geas I put on them will
start to fade, and they’ll lose the ability to make him see them. And as
the geas fades, they’ll forget why they’re haunting Reggie and
start to drift back to their old homes. You won’t have to do anything,
yet Reggie will
think
that it’s you.”

They
both stared at her, looking awestruck. They hadn’t given her that
particular look since they were tiny children, and she had amused them by
catching a faun and making it dance.

And
as she heard the chattering of the motor in the far distance and chivvied the
girls into cleaning up the site and heading back down the path to the road, it
occurred to her that this evening might represent a triumph in more ways than
one.

Not
only had she gained supremacy over an army of the dead, she had once more
gained the upper hand, most decisively, over her own children. They would be
long in forgetting this.

And that was—a
good thing.

April 30-May 1,
1917
Longacre Park, Warwickshire

REGGIE HAD COMPLETELY
FORGOTTEN—until his mother reminded him of it over dinner—that the
next day was May Day, the day of the school treat at Longacre and the school
prize day. Well, why
should
he remember? The day of the school treat
and prize day had always been June first, not May Day when
he
had been
growing up.

But
the war had changed this, as it had so many other things. School ended early
now, so that children could help with the farm work their fathers and brothers
were not here to attend to. The country, and more importantly, the army, needed
to be fed; farm work came before schoolwork. And the traditional May Day
festivities were not nearly so festive as they had been. There would be no
church fair, or at least, not the sort that delighted children—the
half-gypsy traveling fair folk with their swinging chairs and carousels, their
booths of cheap gimcrackery and games like coconut shy and pitch-toss were not
traveling any more. In fact, most of them were off in the trenches themselves,
and the old men, children, and women that were left simply could not cope by
themselves. With sugar and other things being rationed now, there would be no
stalls featuring the forbidden foods that one was only allowed to eat at a
fair. The church fair would be a very sad and much diminished version of its
former self. Someone would probably set up a hoop-la game and a coconut shy,
but the prizes would not be the glittery fairy dolls and wildly colored
crockery of the past—no, they would be home-made rag-babies and whatever
someone had found in the attic that hadn’t made it onto the white elephant
table. There would not be a greased-pig race, not with pigs being war
resources. There would be no egg-and-spoon race for the same reason. Oh, there
could have been a race using rocks or plaster eggs, or potatoes, but it
wouldn’t have been as much fun without the hazard of breaking the egg. No
one left in Broom was nimble enough to climb the greased pole, so that had been
canceled as well. There would be no Morris dancers, who by tradition were all
men. No procession through the town of the hobby-horse, green man, Robin and
Maid Marian—once again, tradition decreed these May Day heroes must be
men. There would be a maypole, but only girls really took pleasure in the dance
around it.

With
all these childhood pleasures revoked, it only made sense—and of course
Reggie was in complete agreement on this—to combine the school treat with
the May Day fair and have it all on the lawn of Longacre. The children might
not be able to have rides on the great swing, but they could play in the maze,
be driven around the grounds in the ancient pony-cart or Reggie’s own
auto, and hunt for early strawberries among the fallen leaves of the woods.
Through means Reggie could not quite fathom, his mother had managed to connive,
beg, or blackmail the authorities into releasing enough sugar to bake cakes and
make ice cream for the treat, so if the children could not eat themselves sick,
they would at least have some sweeties.