Prospero's Children (19 page)

“
She
can,” said Pegwillen wretchedly, shrinking into retreat. “She’s too strong. Too strong to fight.”

“Give me the key,” Fern said, “and I’ll do my best to defeat her.”

“
Could
you?”

“I don’t know.” Whatever the cost, she sensed she must not lie. “It’s always better to try than to give in.”

He was in the hallway now, the clutching fist thrust behind him, his other hand almost extended, almost withdrawn, the longest digit uncurling toward Fern. The malformation of his body exaggerated the ambivalence of his stance, so that he appeared to be visibly wrenched in opposite directions, his humpback pulling away from her, his head twisted awry by double confusion. “Pegwillen,” Fern said gently, part pleading, part imperative, “give me the key.” He made a movement toward her—she was sure of it—there was surrender in his face—

But it was too late. The front door burst open, and Alison came in like a storm, no longer Alison but Alimond, unmistakably and eternally Alimond, her hair spreading around her like a great web, her eyes like slits of broken glass. Will gave an exclamation of horror; Ragginbone, taken off guard, spat out the words of some interdiction he no longer had the power to impose. Fern lunged for the key, but Pegwillen seemed to melt away from her, and Alimond seized his fist and snapped the knotted fingers open with such force they cracked like twigs. “The key!” she gasped, and her breath came short, and Fern saw the energy of the Lodestone coursing through her, even as it had when she herself first held it, and the fire irradiated her veins and throbbed through every muscle, and her head was flung back in ecstasy or anguish, and the red smolder of her heart shone through flesh and skin and clothes. A great shudder passed through her, violent as an earth tremor, and then she was laughing, but though her mouth laughed the sound that emerged was triumphant without joy.

“Release me!” begged Pegwillen. “You promised—”

“I release you,” she said, “from the burden of your existence,” and she plucked him off his feet and pushed his head into his hump and his legs into his belly, squeezing him into a ball like plasticine, rolling and crushing him until he crumbled between her palms and was brushed away like dust on the empty air. Fern remained immobile, too stunned to scream. “And now,” Alimond said, “and
now
, Caracandal—” The Watcher stood tall before her, and in his expression there was a weary courage, pride without hope, an authority now fruitless. The Lodestone had touched her, and she knew no more doubts. “In the semblance of a rock you have spied on me,” she said. “I gather you feel yourself akin to such inanimate things. So be it. A rock you have chosen, and a rock you shall remain.
Fiassé!
Ruach fiassé!
” She made a motion as if she were throwing something, and a wind tore through the house, a wind that slammed wide any doors in its path, that tugged hair from the scalp and tears from the eye, hurling Will back toward the kitchen table, pinning Fern against the wall. For an instant she saw Ragginbone standing like a pillar of resistance, his coat streaming behind him, then the heavy cloth seemed to be blown into rags, and his body crumpled and tumbled, and he was whirled away like a gust of leaves, and when she looked out of the kitchen window there was a rock on the hillside where he had always sat, a rock that would never speak again. There was no time for sorrow or anger, only desperation. As Will picked himself up an idea came to Fern, a brainstorm born of hopelessness which she knew might lead to disaster. But she must do
something
. She needed to get down the hall but Alimond was in front of her, her attention veering toward her remaining opponents. Lougarry entered through the open door even as she raised her hand. Alimond spun at her presence, her lips flaring into a smile that was all thinness and poison. “So the wolf-bitch has found me at last,” she said. “You are too late to help your master. He’s a lump of rock on the hill for all time now. Somewhere in the core of the stone his mind knows, his heart feels, but he will not spy on me or curse me again. You should have hurried, whelp: I might have had trouble dealing with the two of you at once. I passed you heading for the road where I left my car but you didn’t see me. My hair must have veiled your sight. A fine pair you were to defy me: a broken beggar and his purblind cur. Go now, cur. Flee while you can.
Uvalé! Chiani néanduu!
”

Beside her, the wall cracked. Fern felt the shudder that ran through the house, heard the crunch of rending brick. Now that the witch was distracted she had been trying to inch past her, toward the drawing room, but she stumbled as the floor quaked, grasping the hall table for support. In the tilting mirror she saw the crack issued onto a blackness filled with whirling pinpricks of light which crowded toward the opening, growing larger as they approached, settling into pairs, becoming slanting ovoids of unreflected glow. There were eight—ten—twenty of them, and her heart shrank at the sight. “Lougarry,” she whispered, “run. There’s nothing you can do. Save yourself. Run!” The wolf’s forequarters were lowered; the silent snarl curled her lip; her yellow eyes were curiously calm. She did not move.

Alimond’s smile stretched out as if it were made of elastic, broadening and thinning, plastered like a red-rimmed slash across the pale frame of her skull. Her flesh seemed to have gone: she was all bones and smile. Her clothing clung as if contracted by suction.
“Uvalé! Lai-rrassé!”
The Rs were a rasp in her throat, the long Ss hissed like a brand on flesh. The first of the creatures was already climbing through the crack while she spoke, a dog-shape fluid as a shadow yet darkly solid, unnaturally thick in the shoulder, its blunt muzzle showing a panting glimpse of wet red tongue and curving jaws. The others poured after it in a mass, an inky cloud, many-legged, studded with eyes, throbbing with the soft, evil growl that Fern remembered hearing before, a single sound from multiple throats. For a moment they halted, waiting upon their enemy; Lougarry stood her ground. “Run!” screamed Will from the kitchen, and “Run!” Fern cried, her voice rising. “Run, Vashtari, run!” The name came from nowhere, from some deep recess in the wolf’s thought, and Fern knew, even as she said it, that it was the name of her true self, the woman she had been before her metamorphosis. Lougarry leaped away as if loosed from bondage, out of the house, over the moor, and the black dog-cloud raced after her. There was a minute when the hall was full of hound—flying limbs, flowing muscles, the beat of paws on the carpet—a minute when Alimond gazed eagerly after the pursuit—and in that minute Fern reached the drawing room and flung open the door.

She could not think clearly: she was too numbed by the successive shocks of Alimond’s arrival and Pegwillen, Ragginbone, Lougarry wiped out or driven away. The idol waited, a squatting malignance, ugly and implacable. It trembled on its plinth as Alimond closed the crack, the two sides heaving ponderously together, brick locking with brick, plaster re-forming, paintwork more than a decade old washing over the fading scar. Fern acted quickly, too desperate even for fear. When she spoke it was no programmed response: her bell-tone rang through the house in a summons loud as a command. Will ran down the hall toward her; Alimond turned on her heel. “Azmordis,” said Fern. “Come to me: I conjure you. Azmordis!”

Alimond cried out:
“No!”
and broke into a jumbled incantation in the other language—a language which seemed to Fern, as her ear grew accustomed, to contain echoes of many better-known tongues possibly descended from it. It’s Atlantean, she thought, in the midst of urgency and resolve. It must be Atlantean . . . But Alimond, thrown off balance by the unforeseen, could not get the words right, and behind the blank eyes of the idol the wereglow began, waxing stronger by the second, the cold white gaze of a spirit that knew no warmth. Between the thick lids the stone shriveled to a film, and then it dissolved, and the eyes lived, and the heavy lips creaked with the effort of speech.

“Fernanda,” he said, and for a moment she remembered a barren heath, under bitter stars. “You have done well, Fernanda.”

He thinks it was the response, she realized. He doesn’t know I summoned him of my own accord.

“Alimond.”

She did not answer. Her eyes were clenched shut, her features convulsed in a frown of terrible concentration. Her left hand held the key tight against her breast, so tight that the knuckles strained through her skin and her knotted fist resembled that of a skeleton. Fern could sense the energy pulsating from the Lodestone, no longer a visible current but a slow buildup of force which made the very air around them weigh heavy. Will, stealing up behind Alimond, reeled back as though he had been pushed. “You cannot do it,” said the idol. “It is too strong for you to master. It may aid you, it may not, but it will not accept your rule. You cannot achieve dominion without my help.” But his offer was meaningless: Fern knew that at once. The Lodestone was a power source like no other, and Alimond did not need to dominate, only to channel it. The Old Spirit, Fern realized, had made a fatal error, a flaw of comprehension perhaps aeons old: he had assumed the Stone was an entity capable of feeling and thought. But it did not think; it
was
. It struck her that Azmordis saw it as a rival to be crushed and enslaved—not the essence of an alternative universe, jettisoned by chance into the wrong dimension, but an actual being imprisoned in the Stone like a spirit trapped in its own receptor. He should have kept pace with modern physics, she thought, and the glimpse of such a gap in his wisdom gave her a brief surge of confidence—then the burden of the air bore down on her, squashing breath from her lungs, suffocating her last attempt at hope.

But Alimond understood the nature of the Stone. She was mortal, she had inherited the warped genes of Atlantis, both the power and the hunger: the understanding was born in her. What she held was not only a key but a splinter of the anvil on which her soul was tempered. The power built in her and around her until the heavy air became so charged it began to crack under the pressure, stabbed through and through with chinks of lightning; her hair lifted of its own volition, spitting microsparks of energy; her face was sucked inward to cling like tissue to cheekbone and jaw. “Alimond,” said the idol,
“you . . . need . . . me!”,
and the grating of his voice seemed to come from the earth itself, so Fern could feel the tremor through the soles of her feet; but the witch was not daunted. She thrust the key between her breasts, against her heart, raised both arms laboriously as though hefting a great weight, and then flung them outward, hurling all the force she had mustered at the idol. The air thickened and rippled with power—the stone mouth yawned into a vast hole from which rage screamed like a gale—the eyes bulged as if squeezed from their carved sockets. And then the head started to split, hairline cracks threaded the torso, and with a detonation that stung the air the statue exploded. Flakes of stone sprayed the room, embedding themselves in furniture and plaster; one cut Alimond’s cheek, but her flesh was so shrunken it drew no blood. Fern, clamped to the wall, blacked out from the shockwave. The witch, become both activator and conductor, doubled over, shuddering uncontrollably from the might she had unleashed. But Azmordis was gone. With the receptor smashed and Javier far away he had no other instrument to hand. She could work her will unchecked.

When Fern came to herself, perhaps thirty seconds later, Will was crouching beside her, and Alimond was standing over them.

She locked them in the cellar. “I don’t care,” she told them, “whether I destroy you or not. You aren’t important, just in the way.” Her grip, as Fern had noticed before, was vise-like. She dragged them across the hall and thrust them down the steps, securing the door behind them. Will was too shaken to resist, Fern had not yet thrown off her faintness.

“In any case,” said her brother, “she could have used magic against us. We can’t fight that.”

“No, but . . .” Fern was still struggling against the giddiness in her head. “I think . . . I think she may have overtaxed herself. Ragginbone was right: she has a tendency to go to extremes. She didn’t have to be quite so . . . melodramatic, just now.”

“Melodramatic!”

Sitting on the cellar floor, Fern tried to clarify her reasoning. “Crushing Pegwillen—sealing Ragginbone in a rock— sending the hellhounds after Lougarry: all that was overkill. I mean, she didn’t have to get rid of Pegwillen at all: he was no danger to her. And with the others, she could have done something
quieter
. She’s vengeful, immoderate: it must have drained her. She wasn’t expecting to have to deal with the idol as well. And now . . . she’ll need everything she’s got to open the Gate. That’s why she didn’t harm us: she doesn’t want to waste her strength. She’s afraid to end up like Ragginbone, exhausting her power till she has nothing left. She’ll have to take a breather before trying to use the key. That gives us some time.”

“Time to do what?” Will asked.

“Get out of here,” Fern said, slightly surprised at the demand.

“And then?”

“Leave out the difficult questions,” his sister said with a wavering smile. “Let’s just get out first.”

The cellar offered few methods of egress. The door was immovable: they had heard Alimond ram the bolts into their sockets. There were two small windows under the vaulting, level with the ground outside, which were just within Will’s reach if he stretched up, but no other exits. “I was in a house once on the south coast where there was a secret passage in the cellar,” Will volunteered. “Smugglers used to use it.”

“I don’t know if there was any smuggling done round here,” Fern said vaguely. “Anyway, we haven’t got a secret passage. You’d have found it before now if we had. It’ll have to be the windows.”

With some difficulty, since it was both heavy and awkward, they maneuvered the wine-rack under one of the windows. It juddered across the uneven flags and the bottles it still contained rattled ominously; Fern favored removing them, concerned about possible breakages, but Will insisted they were vital makeweight. Even with the rack in position, scaling it proved harder than expected. Will made the attempt, claiming he was the more agile; Fern gave him a leg-up. It took several false starts, savage exhortations to his sister, and a vocabulary she did not bother to censure before he had scrambled on top, and all the time they sensed an undercurrent of growing urgency, a compulsion close to panic tugging them onward. They had no respite to grieve for Ragginbone and Pegwillen, no thought to spare for Lougarry. They must get out, do something, though what to do, or how, they did not know. If they didn’t stop Alimond, no one would: there was no one else left.