The Gates of Sleep (53 page)

Theoretically. But Madam was older, treacherous, and far
more ruthless… He couldn’t think about that now. Because Madam was
only half of the equation; Reggie was the other half. Satanic rites demanded a
Priest, not a Priestess, and it was in the hands of the Priest and Celebrant
that most of the control resided. No matter what Madam thought, it was Reggie
who was the dangerous one—doubly so, if he, unlike his mother, actually
had the gift of Mastery of one of the four Elements. He hadn’t shown
it—but he wouldn’t have to. The power stolen from all the tormented
souls that he and his mother had consigned to their own peculiar hells was
potentially so great that Reggie would never need to demonstrate the active
form of Mastery. Only the passive, the receptive form, would be useful enough
for him to wield—which was, of course, impossible to detect. But if
Reggie could see power and manipulate it, rather than working blind as his
mother was, he was infinitely more dangerous than she.

And if he actually
believed?
He could have allies
on his side that no mortal could hope to overcome. The one advantage to this
was that such allies were tricky at best and traitorous at worst. “
I
can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

“Aye, so can I, and so can any man, but will they
come when you do call them?”

Countering this was that true believers must be few and far
between, and would the Lord of Darkness be willing to squander them?

Andrew felt himself trembling, and tightened his muscles to
prevent it. Yes, Reggie was the more dangerous, as this house full of sleeping
servants demonstrated. Their condition proved to Andrew that Reggie was, if not
a Master, a magician as well as a Satanic Priest. He had, in one ruthless move,
pulled the life-energy of every servant in this house that could not resist him
into his own hands, draining them just short of death. Not that he would have
balked at killing them—but
that
could not be done by occult
means, or at least, not without expending as much energy as he took in. So
Reggie was now immensely powerful, bloated with the strength stolen from an
entire household—his mother’s collapse a half hour ago had given
him plenty of time to array his defenses, and he would, of course, be expecting
an attack.

And before he went to face his enemy, Andrew now found
himself faced with a dilemma. Of all of those sleeping servants, there must be
some who had fallen while doing tasks where their lives would be in
danger—tending animals—near fires—

He ran for the kitchen.

Marina, transmorphing into the form of a wren in the blink
of an eye, shot up through her own shields and darted into the cover of the
dying bushes. All she could do was to thank heaven that she had spent so much
time among wild creatures—she knew how they felt, moved, acted. She could
mimic them well enough to use the unique strengths they had. And it didn’t
take nearly as much power to do so as it did to lash out with mage-fire or
change the world around her. If she could keep attacking Madam physically,
Arachne could not possibly attack Marina magically. To change into a beast or a
bird or some other form cost Marina a fraction of the power it took to lash out
with mage-lightning. And she was younger than Arachne; that might be an
advantage too.

She left the shields in place behind her, hoping that Madam
would be deceived into thinking she was still inside them.

She peered out from under the shelter of a leaf the same
color and almost the same shape as she, shaking with fear and anger mingled.
Green lightning lashed at the shields, splattering across their surface,
obscuring the fact that there was nothing inside them. Madam held both her
hands out before her, lightning lashing from her fingertips, her face a
contorted mask of hatred mingled with triumph.

Go
ahead. Waste your power. You won’t find any
more here.
Marina let the shields collapse in on themselves. Taken by
surprise by the sudden collapse of those defenses, Madam lashed at the empty
place for a moment, the energies that pummeled the spot where Marina had stood
so blindingly powerful that when she cut off her attack, there was nothing
there but the smoking ground.

Madam stood staring at the place for a moment, then
cautiously stepped forward to get a better look.

She was so single-mindedly intent on destroying Marina that
it had not yet dawned on her that if Marina really had been destroyed, Madam
herself should have been snapped back into the real world again.

And in that moment of forgetfulness, it was Marina’s
turn to strike.

Madam’s advantage—she was swollen, bloated with
stolen power. Still. But bloated as she was—and used to having all the
power she needed—she might not think to husband it. And here, probably
for the first time, she was able to see what her power was doing, able to use
it directly instead of indirectly. That might intoxicate her with what she
could do, and make her less able to think ahead.

Marina had to combat Madam in such a way that Madam couldn’t
use
all that stolen power directly. So it was a very, very good thing
that Elizabeth had been so very busy collecting folk ballads as the prime
motive for her visit to Blackbird Cottage—and a very good thing that
Marina had been employed in making fair copies of them.

Because one of them, “The Twa Magicians,” had
given her the pattern for the kind of attack she
could
make, one that
might lure Arachne into making a fatal mistake.

That curse
—
I can do things against it
here that I couldn’t do in the real world. I can see it—and I can
move it. It’s a connection between us, and I think I can make that work
in my favor.

Swift as a thought, Marina the wren darted out of the cover
of the leaves, and in the blink of an eye, had fastened herself in Madam’s
hair.

But she didn’t stay that way for long.

With a writhing effort of will, she transmorphed herself
again, and a huge serpent cast its coils about Madam in the same moment that
the evil sorceress realized that something had attacked her.

By then, it was a bit late, for her arms were pinned and
the serpent was getting the unfamiliar body to contract its coils. Belatedly,
Madam began to struggle, and Marina squeezed harder.

But Madam wasn’t done yet. And what Marina could
do—so could she.

Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a
little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed
in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black
panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the
ground and biting for the back of her neck.

That’s a ploy anyone can play
—Marina
became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s
tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat,
tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

Ha!
Into the air the great cat flew, and she came
down as a wolf.

But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish
wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds
of Irish elk.

Oh no—!
The wolf slashed at her legs, by its
build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—

And became a golden eagle, dropping down onto the wolf’s
back, fastening three-inch-long talons into fur and flesh and slashing at the
head with her wicked beak. The Mongols of the steppes and the Cossacks of
Russia hunted wolves with golden eagles—

But before the beak could connect, fur and flesh melted
into a roaring tower of flame, and Marina backwinged hastily into the air
before the raging fire Madam had become could set her feathers alight. But
evidently Madam hadn’t heard “The Twa Magicians,” or she
would have known Marina’s next transformation—

—into a torrent of water. The form most natural to a
Water Mage.

Andrew was not a moment too soon; the cook had fallen
across the front of the big bread-oven, although she had only just started the
fire in it, and it hadn’t heated up sufficiently to give her serious
burns. One of her helpers had been cutting up meat, though, and the last
falling stroke of his cleaver had severed a finger.

Blood poured out of the stump, running across the table,
dripping off the edge, pooling on the floor. He could easily have bled to death
if Andrew hadn’t gotten there when he had.

In a moment, Andrew had the bleeding stopped, though he’d
been forced to use the crudest of remedies, cauterizing the stump with a hot
poker, for he hadn’t time to do anything else, and blessing the spell
that kept the poor fellow insensible. Another kitchen maid was lying too near
the fire in the fireplace where the big soupkettle hung—one stray ember
and she’d have been aflame. He moved her out of harm’s way.

That cleared the kitchen—with his heart pounding, he
ran out into the yard and the stables.

There he discovered that the animals had fallen asleep as
well, which solved one problem. At least no one was going to be trampled.

Here the problem was not of fire, but of cold; left in the
open, the stablehands would perish of exposure in a few hours as their bodies chilled.
He solved that problem by dragging two into the kitchen, which was certainly
warm enough, and the third into an empty, clean stall onto a pile of straw,
where he covered the man with horse-blankets.

He dashed back inside, painfully aware of the passing of
time. It was too late—he hoped—for the maids to be mending and
laying fires. He couldn’t go searching room to room for girls about to be
incinerated—

But his heart failed him.
Oh, God. I must.
He
began just such a frantic search of the first floor, wondering as he did so
just how long it would be before Reggie ambushed him.

Whenever it happened, it would be when Reggie was at his
readiest—and he, of course, at the least ready.

Madam was running out of ideas, so she became a huge
serpent, at home on land or water—which was just what Marina had hoped
for.

The torrent turned immediately to hail and sleet, the
enemies of the cold-blooded reptile, and the one thing they were completely
vulnerable to. Marina poured her energy into this transformation—which
would have to be her last, because she was exhausted, and could sense that she
hadn’t much left to spend. But she didn’t have to kill Arachne. All
she
had to do was immobilize Madam, then get her own two hands on the
woman. It was, after all, Madam’s curse, and curses knew their caster;
she could
feel
the thing tangling them together. Over the course of
this battle, Marina had been weaving the loose ends of that curse back into
Madam’s powers whenever they came into physical contact. Now Marina would
just send it back, if she could have a moment when she could concentrate all of
her will—her
trained
will—on doing so.

The cold had the desired effect. The serpent tried to raise
its head and failed. It tried to crawl away, and couldn’t. In a moment,
it couldn’t move at all. A moment more, and it lay scarcely breathing,
sheathed in ice from head to tail. The eyes glared balefully at her, red and
smoldering, but Madam could not force the body she had chosen to do what she
willed.

Marina fell out of the transformation, landing as herself
on her knees on the ice-rimed grass beside the prone reptile. She was spent.
I
can’t
—

I must. There was no other choice, but death. Go past the
end of her strength and live and return to Andrew—or die.

Weeping with the effort, she gathered the last of her
power, isolated the vile black-green energies of the curse just as she had
isolated the poison in Ellen’s veins, and shoved it into her hands and
held it there. With the last of her strength, she crawled to Madam—she
didn’t need to pierce Arachne’s skin for this—they were both
immaterial, after all—

She placed both hands on the serpent’s head—and
shoved. And screamed with the seething, tearing pain that followed as the thing
that had rooted in her very soul was uprooted and sent back to its host.

Reggie waited for Andrew where he had clearly been for some
time; in the center of a red room, with a desk like an altar in the very center
of it. An appropriate simile, since on the desk lay the dead body of a woman in
a superior maid’s outfit, her throat slit, blood soaking into the
precious Persian rug beneath.

Reggie was not alone, either. To one side
stood—something.

There had been a sacrifice here to call an ally, and the
ally had answered in person.

It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t material—it
didn’t even have much of a form. To Andrew’s weary eyes, it was a
man-shaped figure of black-green flame, translucent, and lambent with implied
menace. Reggie pointed straight at Andrew. “Kill him!” he
barked—a smile of triumph cutting across his face like the open wound of
the woman’s throat.

“No.”
The figure shifted a little.
“No.
First, he is Favored, and I may not touch him. Second
—” Andrew
got the impression of a shrug. “—
think of this as a test of
worth. Yours, and perhaps, his.”

Reggie stared, aghast—he had not expected
this
response. “But the bargain—” he cried. “I’ve
worshipped, given you souls, corrupted for you, killed in your name—”

“Which was the bargain. You have received in the
measure that you earned. This is outside the bargain. You will see me again
only when this combat is decided.”

And with that, the figure winked out, and was gone.
Hah,
Andrew thought, with a glimmer of hope.
“But will they answer when
you do call them?”

Reggie stared at the place where it had been with his mouth
agape. And Andrew took that moment to attack.