Yesterday's Magic (7 page)

Welly nodded and shivered, but Merlin looked sharply into the surrounding darkness. Clutching the hilt of his sword, he whispered, “And perhaps something more solid than ghosts as well.”

In the smoky black night, patches of deeper darkness flowed silently toward them. Here and there, the low fire-light glinted on what might be an eye or a fang. Quietly Merlin gestured at their campfire. It blazed into a column of violet light. Squeals and growls broke the silence as the light showed a closing circle of creatures. Most seemed more animal than human. Skin flapped from the bodies or glistened with sores. Eyes and limbs were missing or oddly multiplied. Some shrank back from the light or scurried away, but some crouched, ready to spring.

Jumping to his feet, Merlin swept his staff toward the nearest group. Purple fire shot from its tip, charring a few creatures before they left the ground. Welly pulled out his sword and sliced into a translucent many-armed creature loping toward them.

Troll hurled rocks at the enemy, then fumbled in his bedroll for his small dagger. Suddenly he squeaked and grabbed at Merlin’s coat. “More, lots more coming!”

Merlin swung around to see a pack of hairy creatures charging from behind a pile of boulders. Before he could even raise his staff, the pack was engulfed in a spray of flame. The remaining creatures looked fearfully into the sky and scattered.

“I can’t leave you helpless incompetents alone for a minute, can I?” Blanche said as she settled to the ground and folded her wings. “The muties around here aren’t nearly as tasty and have really bad attitudes. Let’s sleep a bit and move on as soon as we can.”

“I heartily agree,” Merlin said. “And thank you.”

She snorted a gout of flame. “If I let the one I’m bound to get himself killed, my debt will never be properly canceled. One of those honor things. Now sleep.”

“Should we set watch?” Welly asked as they rolled out their blankets.

Flopping on the ground, Blanche encircled the three with her neck, body, and tail. “I don’t think they’ll be bothering you any more tonight. Not with
me
around. So stop jabbering and sleep.”

Merlin didn’t find that easy, tired though he was. But he also didn’t find the stench of dragon breath nearly as disturbing as the distant glow of the dead city. Rolling over, he turned his back on that and eventually drifted into troubled dreams.

For several days, they followed the course Merlin sensed trailing into the southeast. Gradually they saw less outright destruction, though the land below looked bleak and largely lifeless. Some scraggly trees appeared, and occasional figures moved in the landscape. These scuttled for cover as the shadow of the dragon passed over. In other circumstances, Merlin knew, he ought to find out what sort of creatures these were—muties, Otherworld denizens, or perhaps somewhat-human survivors. But no time could be spared for that now.

Finally one late afternoon found them threading their way into mountains. Merlin wished he had paid more attention to European geography, but as their course was now more east than south, he guessed these were the Carpathians. Here some more trees survived, and they glimpsed planted fields where a few huddled settlements cowered under cliffs or were tucked into narrow valleys. Merlin didn’t sense any other than normal magic about them.

As they climbed higher among the mountains, Merlin became alert. The trail he had been following for days had, at times, nearly broken, but now it was thickening into more of a rope than a thread. Heather and the magic that had abducted her both felt near at hand. Their exact goal became clear as they glided through a mountain pass and saw an only partly ruined stone castle on the mountainside ahead.

Merlin leaned forward and called to the dragon, “That’s it—where we’re headed.”

“That’s obvious enough, wizard boy. The place reeks of magic. So what is your great rescue plan?”

Merlin hated to admit that he didn’t have much of a plan, not until he knew the situation here. “We could start out by simply swooping down where Heather is and seeing if we can grab her. What do you think, Welly?”

“A frontal attack? Might work. Obviously approaching on a bright white dragon ruins our chances at stealth.”

“Well,
sorry,
” Blanche huffed. “Next time you can walk.”

Ignoring her, Merlin clutched his staff and closed his eyes a moment. Then, opening them, he focused on a tower on the building’s far right. “See that tower, the tallest one with the conical top? That’s where Heather is. We might as well make straight for there, to test their defenses if nothing else.”

They felt Blanche’s growl rumbling through her whole body. “I didn’t sign up to be caught in the middle of a magic workers’ battle.”

“You didn’t sign up at all,” Merlin reminded her. “You were drafted. And those are the orders—unless you can think of something better.”

“Besides turning and flying back home? All right, in we go.”

Their steady pace suddenly changed as the wings beat blurringly fast and the dragon shot forward like a spear. The wind of speed blew any shrieks away as they quickly closed in on the tower. Merlin, clutching a dragon scale with one hand and his staff with the other, thought he caught sight of two figures at its arched window.

Suddenly they jerked forward as the dragon furiously backstroked with her wings. Veering abruptly sideways, she circled around and hovered some three hundred feet from the tower. “Magic barrier,” she gasped. “Nearly splattered myself like a moth against it.”

“I’ll try to crack it,” Merlin yelled, pointing his staff. A thin beam of purple light shot forward, then shattered into harmless sparks. Concentrating, he increased the power. Purple tendrils spread over the invisible wall, but no cracks appeared.

“Uh-oh. Trouble!” squeaked Troll from the back. “Bats!”

Merlin kept focused on the barrier, but Welly looked up, drawing his sword. “Bats? That’s not exactly a big threat.”

“No! Troll knows. These bad bats. Vampire bats!”

Frantically Welly began swinging his sword as the cloud of darting black shapes closed in. Most stayed out of reach, though with sickening splats, he hit a few. Twisting her neck, the dragon sprayed the air with flame—incinerating bats but nearly choking her riders.

Suddenly the barrier dissolved of its own accord. A bolt of green power shot from the tower window. The dragon veered sideways, and Merlin, hanging nearly upside down, shot out a purple bolt that knocked aside the green.

A hail of green fireballs followed as the dragon dodged. Merlin frantically deflected them. Suddenly Blanche shrieked, tearing the sky with pain. “My wing! Going down!”

She flipped over and in a ragged spiral dropped downward. Dizzily her riders glimpsed a knifelike ridge of rock and the boulder-strewn ground beyond. Barely able to hold on, Merlin couldn’t focus on any target. He felt hopelessly vulnerable. As his sight swirled past, he glimpsed the tower room glowing green. A massive bolt of power shot toward them. Miraculously, it suddenly seemed to jerk aside, missing them by a few feet and slicing off the top of a rock pinnacle. Then their fall took them over the ridge, out of sight of the castle.

With a shudder, Blanche opened her half-folded wings, and their plummeting slowed. They came to a rough landing on a rock ledge at the base of a cliff. After realizing they had indeed landed, not crashed, the three passengers crawled off and sat dizzily on the ground.

Troll was the first to recover. “Dragon tricksy. Big faker!” he cried.

“I am not!” Blanche insisted. “I’ve got a huge hole in my left wing, and it really hurts! But I
did
have to get us out of there. We were, as the saying goes, like sitting ducks.”

“Good strategy,” Welly grumbled, “if it hadn’t nearly dumped us all on the rocks.”

“Well, it didn’t, did it!” she snapped. “You lot may not be good for much, but at least you ought to be able to hold on.”

Shaking away the last of his dizziness, Merlin stood up. “Let me look at your wing. I’m not much at healing magic, but maybe I can—”

“Don’t you touch it, meddlesome boy! I’ll deal with it myself.”

Sitting on her haunches, Blanche folded her left wing forward, holding it up to her snout. A ragged hole was scorched through the leathery membrane. Black drops of blood welled from the edges and dropped, hissing, onto the stony ground. The dragon grunted. Little gouts of flame burst from her lips and caressed the wound. The bleeding stopped and, to the amazement of the watchers, the gaping wound slowly shrank. Finally the white surface of the wing, though rough in that spot, was again unbroken.

“There,” Blanche said smugly. “I’ll fly again, though no thanks to you and your insane aerial battles. If you ask me—”

With a sharp crack, the ground suddenly fell away from under them.

V
IEW FROM THE
T
OWER

D
ays had passed since Morgan stormed out of the tower prison. Desperately Heather wanted out of this place, and she was furious with herself for not being able to get out on her own. But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be rescued—not by Earl.

Morgan hadn’t believably explained why she’d been brought here. Surely, Heather realized, her own magic wasn’t strong enough to be of much use to as powerful a sorceress as Morgan. There must be some other reason, and Heather was very much afraid that she knew what it was. She hadn’t been stolen just as a magic worker—but partly as bait.

If all this was also a trap to lure Earl here, then she was putting him in tremendous danger. The solution was becoming inescapable. It might be better if she just gave up and agreed to join with Morgan—while trying not to really help her very much. Then Earl could live the life he was meant to—helping Arthur build a united peaceful Britain.

The idea brought tears stinging to her eyes. How could she face the rest of her life without Earl? Well, at least, Heather realized grimly, if Morgan was involved, it was likely to be a short life.

After Morgan had left, Heather helped the female rat move the remains of her mate back into the wall. Heather knew that most people didn’t think animals felt things as deeply as humans did. But she was certain they did. Those two rats had been mates for life. And now the little female felt terribly hollow and alone—that feeling filled Heather’s mind whenever she picked up her thoughts. Heather continued to share her meager meals but placed the food right by the rat hole to reduce the risk if Morgan should sweep in again.

As she had for days, Heather moved to the window and looked again at the stone walls, wondering if she dared climb down. The pale afternoon light showed only shallow dark cracks between the stones. There seemed no way she could do it unless she could turn herself into a lizard. Her mind had played around with that, picturing a lizard, picturing her own hands as tiny lizard feet. But she didn’t dare. Earl had warned her about how dangerous animal transformation could be. Without practice, she could turn herself into a hybrid monster—or a quivering blob of dying flesh.

The door clattered open. Heather jumped but forced herself not to look around.

“No word of greeting, my dear?” Morgan said silkily. “No matter. I’m sure we’ll work together well in time.”

Heather felt the woman come stand beside her and smelled the faintly sweet perfume she wore—mustily sweet, like a whiff of dead things. Morgan put a cold hand on her shoulder, and Heather shivered.

“Yes, keep looking westward, dear. We should be having a reunion soon. I believe your crazed elderly sweetheart will be arriving any minute.”

Brushing Morgan’s hand aside, Heather spun around to face her. “So this is a trap, isn’t it? You just snatched me to use as bait!”

Morgan’s green eyes snapped with annoyance, then she laughed. “Disappointed? You really thought I would go to all this trouble to snatch a run-of-the-mill child witch to work as my special partner? You think far too highly of yourself, my dear.”

Laughing again, Morgan paced around the small tower room, then she turned back to her prisoner. “Actually, I’m being somewhat unfair. So unlike me, I know. Merlin did seem to feel you have some special new breed of power. And, foolishly infatuated though he is, he remains rather sharp about such things. With the world changing, I can use all the extra help I can muster. And I am sure that once this unpleasant episode is over, you and I can work together—to our mutual benefit.”

Heather glowered at the floor but said nothing. Morgan sighed and continued. “I admit to having a hard time in Britain lately with Arthur and Merlin back to their old ways. Getting Merlin away from there and disposing of him once and for all will make my life a great deal easier. And you, my dear, will help in that as well.”

“Never!”

“Oh, how melodramatic you are! You don’t have to do anything—just be here. The farther I can lure him from his home ground, the greater my chances against him will be. The old magic—Merlin’s magic—works like that, giving you greatest strength on your home turf. But I’ve spent the last several centuries traveling the world, what’s left of it, and I’m quite at home anywhere.”

Heather wished she could wipe that smug smile off the woman’s face but could think of nothing biting to say. “So where are we now? Where is this dreadful castle of yours?”

“It’s not my castle, really. I just use it sometimes. A gate to one of my favorite Otherworlds is here. No doubt you’ve noticed my little flying friends? I’m keeping them out of your room—for now. You wouldn’t be much use to any of us drained of blood.”

Involuntarily Heather glanced over her shoulder. Morgan moved beside her to look out the window. “Yes. Keep an eye on that low gap between the mountains. I sense he’ll be here quite soon. He’s moving a little faster than expected, but I suppose we’ll see why soon enough.”

Heather stared at the saddle between two jagged mountains. She was torn between longing for Earl to come for her and wanting to warn him, to urge him to turn back. If only she could communicate with
him
instead of the scattered voices that randomly dropped into her mind.

Clasping her hands, hoping Morgan wouldn’t notice, she clutched Earl’s bracelet and tried to conjure up his face—pale and thin, heavy dark eyebrows, perpetually mussed black hair, hawklike nose, and lustrous dark eyes.

Don’t come here,
she thought.
It’s a trap. Turn back, turn back. I love you.

She concentrated hard but felt nothing. She scowled. What good was having power if she didn’t know how to use it? But getting Morgan as a tutor was not the answer.

The mountains had become a dark silhouette against a dusky sky when Heather’s straining eyes picked out something moving over the pass. A white speck in the air slowly coming closer. She felt Morgan tensing beside her and knew the sorceress saw it too.

“How extraordinary,” Morgan exclaimed. “He’s using a dragon. They’re so hard to find these days, to say nothing of getting one to cooperate. Your boyfriend never ceases to amaze me. That’s what makes our little feuds over the years so interesting. But all good things must come to an end.”

She turned and looked at Heather. “I’m happy to have you observing, my dear. Very educational. But I really can’t have you interfering.” Rapidly she wove her hands through the air, and suddenly Heather felt herself enmeshed in prickly bands of force. She struggled to tear them away but could scarcely twitch a muscle.

Helplessly Heather watched as Morgan, chanting to herself, began drawing a green glow out of the air. The glow solidified into a pulsing emerald globe. Casually letting this hang in the air beside her, Morgan leaned out the window.

“Good backup, but first let’s bring out my special defense forces.” She opened her mouth with a long piercing cry, followed by a string of chirps and yips.

Her head frozen in one position, Heather at first saw no change. Her sight was fixed on the mountain gap and the approaching speck of white. But it was more than a speck now. Great batlike wings were visible along with a snaky head and tail. It
was
a dragon! Despite herself, Heather was awed. A real dragon. How had Earl managed that?
Please, oh please, turn back!
Again she felt her thoughts stay trapped in her mind.

Now a subtle difference came over the air as if clear water poured down a glass pane. The dragon had picked up speed and was shooting toward them. Suddenly, with frantic backpedaling, it swerved aside, and Heather could see that it indeed carried a rider. No, several riders.

“Too bad, that speeding worm saw the barrier,” Morgan commented. “It would have been quite entertaining to see it collide. Well, prolongs the fun.”

A bolt of purple energy launched from the dragon’s back and shattered against the nearly invisible barrier. Several more came. Tendrils of purple spread over the surface, but nothing cracked. Then the flying figure was engulfed by a black cloud, a cloud that swelled and shrank and fluttered at its edges. Bats, Heather realized. Thousands of bats!

The dragon swooped and dove, then suddenly loosed a stream of fire, tearing ragged holes in the cloud. Wind blew them the reek of burning bats. Morgan raised a hand and the barrier melted away.

“Enough of this,” she cried, shooting a blast of green power directly at the dragon and riders. It was met by a beam of purple. Volley after green volley was deflected until the twisting, dodging dragon suddenly shrieked, flipped over, and began spirally down.

“Now we have them!” Morgan cried, reaching for the green ball that pulsed with power in the air beside her. “Just waiting for the right moment.”

Heather couldn’t even scream her fury. If only she could attack Morgan, destroy her aim! A small furious thought bit into her.
I can!

Out of the corner of her eye, Heather saw a gray shape streaking their way.
Yes, rat, bite her!

Morgan reached back, ready to hurl the ball.

Now!

Just as Morgan thrust the ball forward, the rat sank her teeth into the sorceress’s ankle. Morgan jerked, propelling the ball slightly askew. Furiously Morgan looked around, but the rat had already dived for cover under Heather’s skirt. Then the sorceress looked back at the sky. “Missed! But no matter. They’re going down. Pity to lose a dragon like that, but the riders are done for. At last.”

The silence that settled over the mountains seemed louder than all the explosions and screechings. Heather’s eyes stung with the afterimages of light and with tears that couldn’t fall.

Finally Morgan broke the silence. “Well, that’s done. Almost a shame, really. Still, that old wizard’s a devious one. I’ll send out a crew to make sure he’s finished. And fresh dragon meat—now there’s a delicacy.”

She headed for the door, then turned and looked at Heather, still standing frozen before the window. With a flutter of her hands, she dissolved the invisible bonds. “If you have melodramatic grieving to do, get it over with. I’ve business to attend to here. Then, when the timing’s right, we’ll be leaving. You should be pleased, you know. I was telling the truth—the first time. I do have a use for you other than as bait.”

The door closed before Heather’s body realized it could move. Then it slowly sank to the floor. Sympathetically a small rat crouched and watched as the girl violently rocked back and forth, choking on sobs and the tears now pouring from her eyes.

In time, Heather knew, she’d have room for guilt and for hate. Now all she felt was bottomless despair.