Delusion (25 page)

“Who, then? It must be someone in Stour, someone who lives here. Or they could have opened a portal outside of Stour and sneaked in on foot, couldn’t they? But you’ve told me you and your friends have wards on all the borders, beyond even what they usually have. You’d know if someone came in, right? Arden?”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“You should bring in the constable. Oh, I know, but couldn’t you fuddle him afterward? If it was one of the magicians, someone from the college I mean, he could find fingerprints, or clues, or—”

“No. There are enough commoners wandering through Stour already.”

“But someone killed him—horribly. Please, won’t you do something, Arden? The Headmaster, he just wants to bury him and have done with it. But if there was no portal, that means there’s a traitor in Stour! Rudyard lied about the portal. You told me yourself he’d kill to protect the college, yet he forbids you to fight the Dresden magicians. It must be Rudyard. He must be the traitor.”

“No!” Arden turned now, leaning back against the vine-clad windowsill and gripping it hard. “I’m sorry about your friend. I liked Rapp, too. But there are bigger things at stake than one man’s life. You need to let this go. There are things you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me! Make me understand!”

“Please, Phil, just leave now. I don’t want anything to—”

She saw it again, there on his face, saw just for one unguarded instant that reciprocation she longed for and made herself doubt and secretly believed in with all her heart. Advancing like a pugilist sure of her strike, she kissed him, her arms finding their home around his body with absolute relief. For a heartbeat the world was bliss, and she pressed herself to him, expecting that chimera melding of bodies, that perfection. But his hands still gripped the windowsill, and his body was as inert and indifferent to hers as an alabaster statue.

“Oh,” she said, drawing away.
I made a mistake, that’s all,
she told herself.
It’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of anything, because nothing ever began. He doesn’t love me, and of course—of course I don’t love him.

She fled, and even as she ran, she found herself listening for his pursuing steps, for a call that would make the world whole again. But she didn’t stop, didn’t turn. If she had, she would have seen Arden in his doorway, looking after her in a manner so peculiar that she wouldn’t have been able to interpret it at all. Arden was skilled at glowering, a master of the wry and the sardonic, and he had looks of fury down pat. Alas, he had no talent for expressing yearning or regret or love, or for silently pleading for patience and forgiveness and understanding.

Not folding her in his embrace was the most difficult, distasteful thing he’d ever had to do. And mere moments ago, he had done something very difficult and distasteful indeed.

Methodically, he smoothed the disheveled bed and plucked from his pillow one luminous golden hair. He tossed it out the window, but an errant breeze caught it and sent it back to the climbing wisteria, where it tangled and writhed, a serpent in the moonlight.

He stripped and lay naked on top of his coverlet, wishing he could banish the other woman’s smell, send the memory of her touch from his skin. Then he called upon the Essence, drawing it up from the ground through the stones of Stour, and through the window he never closed, until the powers of the earth made him pure again.

Phil’s muster was small the next evening. She took them to the firing range they’d devised, but their shots grew sloppy and widely spaced. She turned to boxing instead, but the young masters and journeymen were so dispirited, they seemed to be punching in slow motion.

When most of her muster had left to prepare for the Exaltation and only Arden’s loyal young masters remained, she sat them in a loose circle around her. Arden himself was absent, and after her humiliation the night before, she was glad.

Tentatively, she led them to talk of possibilities. They were full of bravado when it came to what they’d do if they caught another Dresden magician on the grounds. Draining, Felton said. No, Hereweald insisted, something worse. Strangle them, like the Kommandant tried to do to Arden. Make his guts boil, suggested the eager, vulpine Master Todd.

“And if magic doesn’t work, call on me,” Phil said.

“You’re a good egg,” Felton told her. “If only Rudyard would let you stay in Stour, you’d have a chance of actually being here when they come.”

“But I have my own war to fight.” She told them about her night of the Blitz, and of all the nights that followed, which she’d heard about on the wireless, of families crushed in their homes, of hospital maternity wards catching fire.

“It’s madness,” Hereweald said, shaking his head. “Someone ought to stop it.”

“Who?” Phil asked. “We’re trying, all of England. But it would take heroes, someone with real power—and real love for this land.”

And then, though it made her cringe inwardly, she took a piece of advice from Fee. She sighed, she looked kittenishly helpless, she batted her eyes.

“We could do it!” Felton said. “Once we crush these Dresdeners . . .”

“Ah, but that might be too late for the rest of us,” she said, heaving another sigh, this time for the express purpose of lifting her bosom into prominence. Bosoms on the battlefield again. It was a wonder no one ever thought of it before. “Stour will be safe, but England will be destroyed.”

“Tell us! Tell us what we can do!”

It was better than she’d hoped; on cue, the rising and falling cicada drone characteristic of the unsynchronized bomber engines sounded from the skies.

“There they go, to destroy my city, to kill more of my friends. Magician or commoner, Germans are the enemy of every Englishman. If only—if only you could stop the planes.”

“We could, I think,” Hereweald said.

“All of them?” Phil asked, face alight, envisioning the bombers disappearing from the skies, sent through a portal to Antarctica, or exploding in a grand supernova.

“Well, no, but maybe one or two.”

“I thought the Essence was limitless.”

“It is,” he explained, “but we’re not. It’s like electrical power. At least, I think it is. Haven’t used electricity since my journeyman days. But if you plug something in, it takes in a certain amount of power and works. But overload it, and it breaks. Poof!” He mimed his head exploding. “We learn to take more and more Essence, use more and more power, but there’s a limit. At least, there is if we want to survive it. We’ve been training, though, and we’re getting stronger by the day. We’ll be strong enough for the Kommandant if he returns.”

“The planes?” Phil prompted. The first of them were overhead, a few Junkers and Dorniers, but mostly the heavy, slow workhorses of the bomber fleet, the glazed, bullet-nosed Heinkels, carrying more than two tons of ordnance primed to drop on civilians.

“I think I could manage to stop one of them. But Headmaster Rudyard couldn’t find out. What do you think, brothers?”

They murmured among themselves, while Phil watched the flock overhead. Two hundred at least, bombers and fighters, in a long loose formation. In another minute they would be past, and this might be the last night. She had heard on the radio that the RAF was engaging them farther from London each day, inflicting considerable losses. The Germans would have to change tactics again soon. Phil desperately needed her magician friends to make this first commitment to fighting her war as well as theirs. After they had a taste of it, she was sure they wouldn’t stop.

Explosion, she heard one say. Decompression, offered another. No, if we do anything that uses too much power, the Headmaster might feel it.

“Quick!” Phil said. “It’s almost too late!”

“Well, we’ll just buy more time,” Hereweald said, grinning, his eyes half closed, head tipped skyward. A rich amber light heaved up from the earth, surrounding the magician’s body in a glowing golden caul, and the last plane in formation froze in midair.

Phil breathed a sound of wonder as the plane, once so menacing, now seemed no more than a child’s toy, a balsa model tethered to the ground on a fine string of Essence. To her surprise, she felt a flash of sympathy for the four-man crew, who must be scared out of their wits.
But what about the hundreds they might have killed tonight,
she reminded herself.

Holding the bomber still in the sky was obviously costing Hereweald some effort, and even in the chill dusk sweat beaded at his temples.

“Felton, will you do the honors?” he asked, his lips barely moving over clenched teeth.

“My pleasure,” Felton said, and prepared to summon the Essence.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” In a moment Arden was among them. Felton’s concentration broke immediately, but Hereweald held.

“You do it then, Arden. It’s your right.” He meant, not that Arden was senior, but that as a man in love—as anyone could plainly see he was—he should bestow this gift on his beloved.

“Let the plane go,” Arden growled.

“No!” Phil said. “It’s their duty! These men, among all of the college, know what they owe to England, and to humanity. I thought you agreed that violence must be met with violence, whatever your laws say.”

“This isn’t what I meant. Those planes have nothing to do with us. Hereweald, let it go this instant.”

“Arden, you led us so far—it’s time we went a step farther. The enemies of England are our enemies. Let the plane and the crew return to the earth.” And heedless whether the Headmaster might feel the percussive shock through the Essence, Hereweald called upon his power to dissolve the bomber and passengers into their elemental parts. He had decided, once and for all, that he was at war.

Arden’s features steeled, and bright nacreous lightening flashed between the two men. At once Hereweald’s jaw gaped and his eyes stretched wide in shock as he clutched at his chest, at a heart that quivered without beating.

“Arden, what are you doing?”

“Killing him,” Arden said grimly, “unless he stops this madness.”

Above, the Heinkel bomber shivered midair, then began to move.

Hereweald fell to the earth, kneeling, with his forehead to the dirt.

Felton leaped at Arden with a quick left jab and a right hook that—to Phil’s immense pride—probably would have resulted in a knockout if Arden hadn’t slammed his friend flat with a burst of the Essence.

“Arden, stop it!” Phil cried, grabbing his collar. There were so many other things she wanted to say, logic and curses and patriotic rhetoric, but in the end all she did was cling to him, her parted lips just below his, waiting for him to make everything all right.

He gripped her shoulders, squeezing them beneath the goldenrod wool so fiercely, she hardly knew he meant it for a caress. “You don’t understand what’s at stake. You don’t know what I’ve had to—” He drew a sharp breath. This was no time for self-pity. “You’re playing with the fate of the world like children.” How could he explain without giving himself away? How could he ask for her patience, her love, when he hated himself for what he had to do? Still holding her, he glared over her head at his brother masters. “You will launch no more attacks on German commoners. Everything we do—everything!—is to protect the college and guard the Essence. We keep the world alive! Germans or English, it is nothing to us who is here.”

She gave him a little shake. “Arden! You don’t mean—”

But a shout from Hereweald killed all chance of Phil and Arden understanding each other then. “The plane! It’s falling toward Stour!”

They knew so little of the modern world, had so little comprehension of technology, that it never occurred to any of them that a plane magically immobilized in the sky would not merrily continue its journey once released. The bomber stalled and began to fall nose first from the heavens. On board, the pilot desperately tried to get the engine started. It sputtered and caught for a moment, then died.

Phil watched in horror as the bomb bay doors opened and two tons of explosives jettisoned from the doomed plane. Arden didn’t understand. To him, the plane was the threat, not the bits of flotsam falling from it, and he focused his exhausted powers on flinging the plane away from Stour. Lighter after dropping its payload, it caught the air and soared in an inexorable downward arc, out of sight, toward Bittersweet.

They couldn’t tell whether the plane crashed, though, because from just over the rising parkland, Stour exploded in a fireball. The highest spires were barely in sight, then they were lost in billowing black smoke. When the smoke swirled and cleared for an instant, they were gone.

They stood rooted.

“Everyone was outside, at the Exaltation,” Felton said, offering hope.

“Not everyone,” Arden said. “Thomas was pestering me about leaving the college. I was annoyed—I told him what the headmasters do to journeymen who refuse to return. He went to his room, refused to join the Exaltation . . .”

“Oh, Fee,” Phil breathed.
I did this,
she thought. “You did this,” she whispered to Arden, and ran to Stour.

The Gothic extravagance that had stretched its spires to the skies was gone, a pile of rubble and stained glass kissed with flame and wrapped in a shroud of ash and acrid fumes.

No—no, not quite gone after all, for through the smoke, she could see that part of the west end of Stour was still largely intact. The library and some of the classrooms had been spared, though many were now open to the elements, but all of the living quarters had been destroyed.

And Thomas, lovely, poetic, innocent Thomas . . .

Phil’s heart broke for her sister, whose own heart would soon follow suit.

Felton’s hopes were justified when several hundred magicians, as stupefied as rabbits in a beam of torchlight, staggered up through the withering jungle from the Exaltation grounds.

They don’t know what to do,
Phil realized as she waited for them to take action. “Take roll, and find out who’s missing!” she called, twisting back her hair and pulling her gloves from her back pocket. “Then do whatever hoodoo you do and find the survivors.” Stan slipped from the crowd like a disentangled shadow. “Help me, Stan. Help me find Thomas.”