Earth's Magic (27 page)

S
creaming, Heather staggered to her feet and raced over the grass toward Merlin’s sprawling, motionless figure. She threw herself down beside him.

Eyes closed, face averted, he whispered, “I’m fine. Almost. Must give you this message. Lean closer.”

She did, and Merlin carefully whispered into her ear the three ancient words, the words from the roots of time, the words of primordial balance. Her eyes grew wide as the words sank into her soul.

He nodded and whispered again, “Go. Morgan and I will finish this. It is our personal fight. Yours is bigger. Transmit these words to the others. Send them around the world. Now it all depends on you.”

Laughing harshly, Morgan was strolling toward them through the grass. “Touching words of farewell, no doubt. Move aside, Heather dear. I’ll deal with you later. But your boyfriend and I have some very old business to finish here.”

Reluctantly, Heather stood and moved back. She wanted desperately to stay, to help. But the words Merlin had entrusted to her and their power weighed heavily inside her. The duty was hers. While Morgan was looking down at her victim, Heather
turned, and with her eyes streaming tears, she slipped silently away.

“Should I just kill you now, Merlin,” Morgan purred, “or would you like to engage in one more futile fight?”

Merlin coughed. “Now, Morgan, you wouldn’t feel right killing me lying down, would you? You must have some sense of honor left.”

She laughed. “Honor? What I honor is winning, and that is what I am about to do. But certainly, for old times’ sake, get up. We’ll go one more round. But you will lose, of course. Everything you stand for is losing today. Can’t you feel it? Look at the battle out there. The tides are shifting. The barriers are down, passages have opened, and our forces have multiplied. But it’s not just here, you know. All over the world, we are fighting and winning. This world will be ours soon, and you and your kind will be only tattered, quickly-forgotten myths.”

With the aid of his staff, Merlin levered himself up. He had landed wrong, he knew. It felt like his right leg was broken. Silently he slipped a pain-suppressing spell down his leg and took a wobbling step forward.

The throbbing ball of power in Morgan’s hand suddenly stretched and coalesced into a glowing green sword. Teasingly, she tossed it from hand to hand, but the look on her face was that of a cat tormenting a mouse. “Odd, isn’t it, that of all the humans alive in this world now, you and I share the most in common. And yet, we are and have always been bitterest enemies.”

Merlin sent purple down his staff in glowing waves of power. “But perhaps we needn’t be,” he said evenly, “if this were a world where power wasn’t always battling power, where it wasn’t always torn between good and evil.”

“Always behind the times, aren’t you, Merlin?” she laughed.
“Those sorts of dreams died out long before even we two were born.”

“Then it’s time to bring them back!”

“Or time to destroy them!” she screamed, slashing down with her sword.

Fending off that stroke with his staff, Merlin leaped sideways. His leg jabbed with pain, but he kept moving. They were well outside the stone circle now, and he sensed he needed to be in its center.

They slashed and parried with weapons so equally matched that neither could touch the other. But with each move, Merlin drew their battle closer to the ring of stones. Finally, in an acrobatic move that tortured his leg, he spun them into the center of the circle.

“Looking for a fitting place to die, are you?” she called. “Excellent choice!” She flung a shield spell about herself like an impenetrable cape and ran quickly around the circle thrusting her sword at each standing and toppled stone. Steadily she drew power from them in jagged green waves.

Merlin largely ignored her. He had anticipated this. She clearly had done much the same in imprisoning Heather—augmenting her own power with that in the ancient stones. That was indeed old power, but it was power that clung to the surface of the world. The power he sought now was older and deeper.

Standing in the circle’s center, Merlin jabbed his staff into the soil. He sent down it a call for help. He sent it deep into the Earth, into the tangled web of ancient roots that he now knew was there. He felt the call sinking, spreading out under this ancient center of the Earth’s deepest magic.

He felt no response.

Morgan had finished her gathering. She turned toward him, her garnered power glowing around her in a vibrant green aura.

“What, Merlin? You’re simply standing there awaiting your destruction? Well, after years of your adherence to foolish dead ideas, you can hardly be blamed for that. Let me oblige you!”

As Morgan flung her arms wide, green power shot from her fingers. Still clinging to the staff with one hand, Merlin deflected her bolt using his other. Blasts of purple and green energy collided. They veered off to smash against a standing stone and then ricocheted back and forth across the circle. Again and again Morgan attacked and Merlin countered, until bolts of power with flaming trails behind them filled the circle with crisscrossing spears of light.

Under this steady onslaught, Merlin felt his own power slowly weakening. Morgan’s power source was close at hand. His, if it ever answered him, was deeper and farther away. Had he miscalculated? Would the Earth not answer his desperate call?

He kept fighting, but each volley left him slightly weaker. His leg was aching more and more, yet he couldn’t shift focus for even a moment to his own poor healing abilities.

Random thoughts flitted through his mind as he countered attack after attack. Overhead, the sky was darkening. Was it evening so soon? Had Heather found somewhere safe in this bloody battlefield? Was she sending out her message? Was it making any difference? After all these eons of waiting, did those ancient words still hold the power to change the world? Were they, and he, too late?

Merlin forced his mind back to the immediate. He could see the rising gleam of triumph in Morgan’s eyes. Weakness and pain gnawed at him. He struggled to keep upright.

Then one massive surge of green hate sent him sagging to his knees. Still clinging to his staff, he caught himself with his other hand, fingers digging into the rocky soil. Then he felt it. A faint rumble, a shivering from deep within the Earth.

With his last strength, he pulled himself to his feet and flung one final swipe at Morgan, deflecting her latest blow.

Then he was nearly toppled over again, but this time by the sheer force of the power pouring out of the Earth. It shot up his staff and out the top like a golden fountain. Frantically Merlin tried to direct it. Soon it was overwhelming Morgan’s green mesh of power and closing in on Morgan herself.

She battled furiously, slicing and hacking at the engulfing golden glow. Her sword trailed green smoke through the ever-shrinking space around her. Suddenly she shrieked. Like a blown-out flame, she was gone. An empty shell of darkness appeared in the center of the golden light. Then the light crashed in and filled that as well.

For a moment, Merlin, stupefied by pain and exhaustion, simply stood and stared at the spot where his old enemy no longer was. The gold light that had tightened like a fist around her suddenly broke loose and crashed over him in a warm, glowing tidal wave. Under it, he sank unconscious to the ground.

Heather fled over the grass, refusing to let herself look back. She’d been entrusted with a staggering responsibility. Whatever happened between Earl and Morgan, she mustn’t fail him now.

A giant standing stone tilted out of the plain ahead of her. She veered toward it, then threw herself down at its base. Its cold bulk rose between her and the two combatants she had left.

The larger battle spread over the plain before her, but she refused to look at that either. The words Earl had spoken to her filled her now. They surged through her like a geyser, straining to break free.

Closing her eyes, Heather lay back on the grass and opened her mind. Instantly she felt another mind. Temesqua, the jaguar boy. His thoughts were frightened and confused as battle surged around him in his far-off jungle.

Fiercely she pushed through his thoughts and grabbed for his attention. Then, slowly and clearly, she thought the three ancient words. She felt his astonishment and joy as they blossomed in his mind.

She followed with words of her own.
Speak the words aloud. Cry them over your land! Then pass them on to other minds that you touch
.

Heather felt a distant call and a ripple of power but didn’t linger in Temesqua’s mind. She sought out another mind to receive her message and then quickly moved to another. With each encounter, she sensed a strange fluttering, not in herself but in the world. In touching these minds, she felt as if she were grasping one strand of an overspreading web. That web, even far beyond where she herself touched it, seemed to pulse with power and with light.

At last, opening her eyes, Heather looked into the sky. Strangely, it was no longer a dull gray. The light she had felt in her mind was faintly flowing overhead.

She blinked in astonishment as a distant memory pushed to the surface of her mind. Once as a small child, before she and her recently widowed mother had moved south from Scotland, she had seen the northern lights. Here they were again. Only now they covered the whole sky with their pulsing veils of rainbow light. And with every minute, they became brighter. Shifting curtains of colored light soon swept over the whole vault of sky.

She sat up, marveling at the beauty, when suddenly the earth rocked and a burst of golden light appeared from behind the stone that leaned over her. Quickly Heather scrambled around the stone and stared.

Back where she had left Earl and Morgan, back in the center of Stonehenge, golden light gushed forth like a fountain. It welled upward toward the aurora. But they did not meet. The distant light that seemed to circle the world and the light that
rose from the Earth seemed to strain toward each other yet could not touch.

Suddenly Heather understood what was missing. She had thought the three words to others. They had been spoken aloud and then passed on. They had been spoken throughout the world. But not here.

Standing, she turned and faced the battlefield. Taking a deep breath, she cried out the words, her voice clear and strong as a bell on a frozen night.

In a rush, golden light spilled from the stone circle, flooding over Salisbury Plain. Then like a crashing ocean wave it leaped upward, rising into the sky even as the aurora cascaded down to meet it. The explosive joining filled the air and the Earth and every cell of her body with warmth and light and peace.

Closing her eyes, Heather sank to the ground and let the wonder of it flow over her and fill her.

In her mind, she heard a distant swelling of excited, joyful voices. She sensed their news but couldn’t break through her own contentment to speak directly with them now.

Later—she wasn’t sure how much later—Heather opened her eyes. The colors overhead had faded into a clear blue sky. She sat up and could see that the battle had ended. Quickly she turned her gaze away from the battlefield and looked toward the ancient stone circle. The golden light that had flowed from it had sunk into the ground, leaving only the faintest glow like a dusting of golden dew. Against that now, she saw a lone, dark figure limping toward her.

With a cry, Heather leaped to her feet and ran toward him. “Earl!” she cried as she flung herself around him, nearly toppling them both to the grass before he steadied them with his staff.

“Earl, you beat her? Morgan is finished?”

“She’s gone. Whether destroyed or withdrawn, I don’t know. But the lights in the sky, that was your doing, wasn’t it? You sent the words.”

She smiled happily. “They were received, passed from mind to mind, and spoken all over the world. But the golden light—that was yours?”

“It was the Earth’s. I just called it forth.”

“We did it!” she cried, and hugged him so forcefully he cried in pain and almost collapsed.

“Earl, your leg! Sit down immediately. I’ll see if I can help.”

Gratefully, he sank to the ground. Heather knelt beside him and gasped as she pulled up the leg of his trousers. Bone jutted through purple and bleeding flesh. “That looks awful! How could you walk?”

“Pain-reduction spell,” he said through gritted teeth as she ran hands over his twisted leg. Hastily he tried to renew the spell, but he still yelped as she clamped her hands on either side of the break and sent power into his shattered bones and torn flesh, forcing them together.

“Sorry,” she said as he sagged into her. “That healing power, that was stronger than I’ve ever known it.”

“I suspect many things may be different from what we’ve known,” he said weakly. Then, looking up, he pointed to something winging swiftly toward them through the sky. “It looks like Goldie. This … eh, this may not be good news.”

As the golden dragon drew nearer, it became clear it was carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle in its jaws. More gently than usual, she landed beside them and carefully placed the bundle on the ground. With trepidation, Merlin folded back the cloth. Inside, the two-headed dog was lying very still.

“Rus!” Heather gasped. “Oh, poor Rus. He tried to save me. He charged that awful goblin and tried to tear its throat out, and
the beast swatted him away as if he were a fly.” She leaned closer, wiping tears from her eyes. “He’s still breathing, I think. Barely.”

All the while, Merlin had been gently stroking the dog, running a hand along his furry back. “He seems to be paralyzed from the necks down. Goldie brought me to him when I first got back. I tried to help him some, but my healing magic is really not much good.”

“I’ll try, though I don’t know how much I have left in me after working on your leg. Oh, poor, loyal Rus. His spine must be broken.” She touched him gently on the right head. He gave one pathetic whimper and shuddered.

Angrily wiping at her eyes, she muttered, “Got to stop crying or I can’t see what I’m doing.” Then, puzzled, she paused a moment and looked up at Merlin. “Earl, keep stroking him. Don’t stop, but look at that.”