The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (39 page)

Selkie also rushed out from the shattered main doors to the room, coming suddenly from behind.

Raven was seized by four of them and flung down before he could react. A fifth selkie loomed over him, brandishing a bludgeon, and aimed a blow at Raven’s skull.

He turned into a seal. The blow did not fall.

His human skin fell away like a white leather coat, and his sleek black body, which would have been so lithe and streamlined in the sea, now
flopped forward, fins waving feebly. The bludgeon clattered down atop the seal.

The men holding Raven down turned into seals. Their hands became flippers, and, without legs to stand upon, they flopped helplessly to their bellies.

Raven shoved them aside and stood up. One that tried to bite him, he kicked in the head.

Peter, with the hammer in his left hand, clubbed to death the two seals within arm’s reach. But he seemed as helpless as they, for both his legs and now one arm were limp weights, and there was a look of fear and horror on his face. “My arm! I can’t move my arm!”

He was grimacing a terrible grimace, and his sweat-slick face was splattered with blood and brains from the seals he slew.

Wendy had the Moly Wand in her hand. And where she waved the wand, selkie fell to their bellies, human disguises gone. In a moment the whole herd of selkies in the room lay writhing and helpless on the floor, flapping their fins and barking.

Many immediately turned on each other with barks and snarls of outrage, and slashed at each other with their teeth, as if hosts of hidden treasons had suddenly been revealed.

Peter pulled himself upright, clutching the bedpost with his left hand, clutching the haft of Mollner in his teeth. Now he twisted his shoulder to drape his right arm across the headboard, and with this he propped himself, while his legs, puny and ridiculous, twisted off to one side.

He spat the hammer into his left hand. “Oh, shit!”

For he saw the angry eyes of the fire-giant staring in through the broken panes of the southern windows.

The giant drew back his titanic arm, readying the torch he used as a bludgeon to sweep through the room and crush all within; but he saw Peter propped against the headboard draw back the hammer, awkwardly, left- handedly, readying to throw.

The giant hesitated, sparks and smoke drifting from its nostrils.

They stared at each other eye-to-eye, man and giant, and, for a moment, neither moved.

Azrael de Gray stepped in through the breach in the wall, Koschei the Deathless behind him to the left and the storm-prince in Roman armor to his right.

Behind them both came the few surviving gunmen: black-jacketed men in blue helmets all.

Azrael kicked aside or stepped over seals in his path as he came forward. Then he stopped, seeing Peter with the hammer raised.

The two creatures stopped behind him, one step into the room. The tall thin shadow that was Koschei radiated a grave stench, and the bony fingers ringing his crown brushed the ceiling. The storm-prince’s face was hidden in his helmet’s shadow, and his plume and red cloak flapped in the wild winds his smallest gestures caused. He stood with his gladius poised above his buckler.

It would have been hard to say whose eyes where more horrible to behold, Koschei’s or Azrael’s. Koschei’s were mere points of baleful light, floating in dark pits of eye sockets, inhuman and terrible. But Azrael’s could have been human, and had once been.

Peter looked over his shoulder at Azrael, then glanced back at the giant. He shifted the balance of the hammer slightly, to allow him to throw in either direction. Peter looked between them, watching both out of the corners of his eyes.

And perhaps he spared a glance for his one remaining arm, which, he held tense in the air before his face. “One down, one to go,” he muttered hoarsely. But it did not sound funny.

One gunman raised his rifle, but Azrael raised his hand, “Wound not my kin!”

The giant stiffened his shoulder. Peter glanced that way. Azrael touched his necklace of magnets and whispered a name. “Somnus, benumb them. North Star’s Blood puts them in my reach.”

Raven felt a heaviness close in upon his limbs. He sank to his knees, fell
forward, his face resting only inches from the buckles of Ben Franklin’s shoes. The ghost or apparition of Franklin had not moved or spoken, anymore than a statue would have.

Raven tried to remember the names and the charm to drive off this magic, but the only thing in his mind was the accusing, indifferent look he had seen in Wendy’s eyes.

The giant now made its move forward, but Azrael shouted, “Surtvitnir! Stand away!” And the giant snarled, belching smoke, and moved back perhaps a foot from the windows, but did not lower his torch. The burning bludgeon waited, the size of a tree, still poised to smash into the room.

Azrael said, “Bromion, why did you not render these here thunderstruck and dazed?”

The storm-prince answered in a soft voice, smooth and silky:

“Know the archangel Uriel, regent of the Sun, was here. Angelic footsteps sanctify; and sacred precincts we spirits go not near.”

Azrael tapped his staff to the floorboards, and when he let go of it, inexplicably, it did not fall, but stood.

Wendy had fallen, and the unicorn horn still was tucked into her skirt. Azrael stepped forward, kicking seals aside, to where she was.

For a moment he stared down at her. Raven, watching with paralyzed eyes, could do nothing.

Careful to avoid the touch of the fallen Moly Wand, Azrael picked up Wendy with arms around her shoulder and legs, the way a man might carry his bride.

Azrael stepped out onto the balcony and held her over the drop.

“I have said I would cast you from this high place if you did not yield Clavargent to me; nor do I lie.”

He put one arm about her waist and dropped her legs so that all her weight was supported in one hand.

At this same moment, Raven saw a tiny figure drop down from the roofbeam to the Moly Wand.

Azrael said: “Somnus! Unchain her limbs!” And to Wendy he said: “Now draw forth the Silver Key from your skirt and put it in my hand!”

“Lassy! Catch!” The Moly Wand flew across space; Wendy caught it; she swatted Azrael across the face.

Immediately his hand turned to flaccid white leather; his face became a hood made of Galen’s skin; his boyish features fell away like a cloak, revealing the tall, dark, majestic man beneath; hawknosed, with grim lines deeply graven about his mouth; his eyes were dark and cruel, and his hair was dark as well except where age had left white streaks above his temples. He stood up, a foot taller than Galen, and his clothes ripped to tatters across his shoulders and down his legs.

When what seemed like Galen’s hand fell away as a glove, Wendy slipped free of the Wizard’s grasp, shouting, “He’s not Galen and cannot cross the wards!”

Raven felt power return to his limbs: Azrael’s spell was broken. He leapt to his feet.

Wendy was balanced for a moment on the broken rim of the balcony, arms windmilling. Then she fell back out of sight, screaming.

The giant’s fist, radiating a terrible heat, crashed in through the windows on the southern side, sending the bed flying into splinters. But Peter had pulled his father and rolled them both to one side, and neither was crushed. On his back, in a tangle of limbs with his unconscious father, Peter flung the hammer left-handed.

The hammer flew fair and true and struck the giant between the eyes with such force that, for a moment, his two eyes faced each other across a widening crater of blood. The skull caved in with a roar and a flash of fire, and the huge body at once became a pillar of ash, strangely without substance, that disintegrated silently on the wind.

“Raven!” shouted Peter. “Ring! Electrocute them!”

The look of fear was on Peter’s face again as the hammer slammed back in through the wall. It struck his left arm, and he was thrown back sliding across the floor, where he lay, unconscious or dead.

Wendy’s scream changed into a whoop of joy, and she floated back up into view, lighter than a thistledown, her skirts and hair flapping about her, weightlessly.

Only Azrael was not dumbstruck.

“Servant of Oberon!” Azrael called. “Return the Silver Key or I destroy your husband!” And he pointed his tall walking stick at Raven. With his other hand, he clutched the amulets at his throat.

“Oberon? We work for Galen!” said Wendy.

“Galen . . . ?” Azrael paused as if in sudden thought.

She laughed. Oddly, it seemed as if her laugh were as bright and gay as ever it had been. She said brightly, “Gravity doesn’t need to weigh us down, do you know that? I’ve been under that illusion my whole life. Now do you think you can weigh me down? You and your silly threats? You sound so goofy when you say things like that! There’s no battle here; that’s just an illusion. What good are the gates of Everness to you without the Key? Fine! Go ahead and win your battle! I’ll just fly away with the Key now, thank you! Maybe I’ll go off into my mother’s kingdom, now that I remember the way there.”

“You scoff at my threat?”

“You won’t hurt Peter or Lemuel. They’re your family. Your threats are an illusion.”

“And your husband?”

Wendy looked over to where Raven stood. She looked him in the eye. She said, “I guess that was just an illusion, too. I have no husband.”

And she turned her head away, putting her face in her elbow, and let the wind sweep her up lightly out over the coast.

She blew like a leaf past the ships of the selkie, away through the air toward the massive clouds, whose towers and folds of distant white were stained in deep, rich colors by the sunrise.

One of the gunmen raised his rifle as if to shoot; but his gaze became slack and fixed, as if the sight of the flying girl were too strange for him to see.

Raven said tonelessly, “Franklin, hand me the ring. I promise to use it well and not to give it to another.”

Azrael turned, “By Morpheus! Stop!” But he was on the balcony outside the house, and Raven was within, and his magic did not reach across the wards.

Raven looked down at the ring in his palm, but he was afraid to put it on. Was he willing to forswear love forever . . . ?

He stepped behind the ghost of Ben Franklin. That the apparition was still here told him the spell was not complete. He had not yet taken possession of the ring; the curse had not yet fallen. Also, the gunmen in black uniforms seemed unable to focus their eyes on Franklin, as if the sight of a Founding Father’s Spirit were too strange for them to be allowed to see.

Azrael said, “Bromion!”

The Roman storm-prince said, “In places touched with sacred quiet are forbidden thunder and riot.”

Raven was panting as if he were struggling under a great weight. His wife had left him, why not give up love? Was it worse than Peter losing all four limbs?

There was writing on the inside of the white gold band:
Tempestos Attonitus, Fulmenos! Ave et Salve! Venire et Parere!
Obviously, magic words to control the storm-princes. He could sweep the enemy away with blasts of lightning and call the winds to blow his wife back to him. Except, if the curse were fact, he would no longer want her when she came.

Raven knew he must put on the ring. It would be only a moment before Azrael woke his gunmen or thought of some clever trick of magic or. . .

But to put on the ring would be to extinguish all hope.

Azrael said, “Koschei, you have the souls of the giants? You can resurrect them?”

“Not in daylight. But the storm-prince still may overcome the son of the mountains.”

“How may this be?”

Koschei said, “He is a murderer, and the blood that streams from his hands has polluted the sacred precincts. The footsteps of Uriel, angelregent of the Sun, cross this room, it is true, but this murderer does not follow in them.”

Raven looked up with tired eyes. He knew, dimly, that he should flee or fight, or do something. But all he said was, “Wendy . . .”

The storm-prince clashed sword against shield, and the noise, louder than any other noise on earth, sent jolts of numbness through his limbs so that Raven fell headlong. At the second clash, Raven was dumb and could not speak. At the third, his wits scattered, turned to chaos by wild noise, and his senses fled.

Raven was thunderstruck. Overcome by sorrow and misery, overcome by magic, he fell into darkness and knew no more.

Here Ends the First Part of

The War of the Dreaming;

The Tale Continues in Part Two

M
ISTS OF
E
VERNESS.