Seraph of Sorrow (25 page)

CHAPTER 12

Multiplication

“That’s it,” Skip told his mentor with a grin, as Andi finished her song behind him. “They’ll have popped. Right in the mayor’s office!”

Edmund Slider returned the smile. “I’m glad you told me about these arachnids you can draw, Skip. It made it much easier to get a message safely to Glory Seabright, without anyone else seeing it. I’m also glad that Andi could make them pop off the wall.” He nodded at the brunette, who smiled shyly.

“It won’t have hurt her,” she pointed out. “Skip and I are working on how to make them last longer, and do more things.”

“Don’t apologize—you were marvelous. And Skip, I’m glad you trusted me enough to come to me and show me what you could do. I promise I will repay that faith.”

Skip didn’t doubt him. “Do you think she’ll know who sent them?” He wasn’t sure which answer, yes or no, would please him more.

“She’ll think someone reckless sent them. That’s the point, as you may have guessed. We want her overconfident. We want her thinking we cannot handle ourselves. We want her,” he finished with a flourish of fingers through his hair, “to show up alone.”

“Alone? She can’t be that crazy.”

“There are very few situations that Mayor Seabright cannot handle alone. With luck, a few nights from now she’ll face one on that bridge.”

Skip felt the thrill of conspiracy. “All right. So what do we do next?”

Slider’s sad smile dampened Skip’s mood. “The next steps are for me alone to take. What I have in mind will require considerable preparation and effort.”

“So let me help! I’m kicked out of school. I sit around here all day drawing freaking insects . . . I’m going crazy!”

Slider gave a teacher’s frown. “You have yourself to blame. By walking out on her at school, you handed her and Mr. Mouton a terrific reason to suspend you.”

“You’re telling me you were polite to her when she was asking
you
questions?”

“I’m an adult. I’ve already paid my dues. If you want to survive long enough to come into your true powers, I suggest you learn to show more respect to authority figures.”

“Show respect to auth—Hi, my name is Skip Wilson. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Cute. Let’s bring this back around to the consequences of your actions. You’ve made keeping an eye on you that much more difficult. Your aunt’s been worried sick about leaving you at home alone. I can’t help her
and
keep my job—and heaven help me, I’ve tried to spend my time in this town doing what I can to help Winoka’s children think more logically.”

“Why can’t you take just a few—”

“Your aunt has considered asking family to come help. You know how hard that is for her. Arachnids are loners enough, and her family . . . well . . . let’s just say, they’re true to type.”

“Fine, I feel bad. So give me something to do, to make up for it!”

Slider shrugged. “It’s not personal, Skip. It’s not a two-person job. I can’t use you here, or even Andi. As you may know, our kind has a saying, ‘Eight legs is enough.’ ”

“But you don’t have eight legs!” As soon as he said it, Andi gasped and Skip wished he could take it back. He saw his teacher’s face lengthen. “All I mean is, I could—”

“I’m doing this alone, Skip.” The wheelchair whirred and Slider’s body swiveled around with it. “When the day comes, we’ll all go to the bridge together and negotiate with Her Honor.”

“Negotiate? She doesn’t negotiate with arachnids!”

Slider’s chair paused, and his head turned enough for Skip to see the man’s sharp nose. “Glorianna Seabright has negotiated with arachnids before. She’ll do it again.”

“She’s too powerful.” Skip shifted his feet. He didn’t know how else to say what he wanted to say—that he didn’t want to lose Slider, like he had lost everyone else.

The blond head nodded. “She is powerful, Skip. Which is why she’s ripe to learn a valuable lesson. Power carries a cost.”

It was too cold to be crisp on the night that Skip, Tavia, and Andi watched restlessly from a cluster of riverside bushes as Edmund Slider ran his motorized wheelchair down the pedestrian walkway of Winoka Bridge. They had crossed over the bridge earlier and scouted the woods by the eastern side to ensure no beaststalkers were waiting at inconvenient points. Slider had pointed out that it was fruitless to scout the western side—that was where Winoka lay, and Glorianna could decide to bring an army if she wished. But when she appeared from the west, striding down the center of the highway in white dress robes, Skip saw no one else.

Tavia let a
tsk
out. “She walks down the bridge like she owns the road.”

Skip scanned the highway for traffic. There was none. “Maybe she does.”

Slider stopped his chair when he got about a third of the way across, under one of the amber streetlights. This forced Glorianna to walk farther before the two could speak.

“Edmund Slider,” she drawled. “The source behind that lovely message.”

“The messengers you received at city hall were not mine,” he replied. “I agreed to be the one to speak with you,
Your Honor
.” He managed to make the honorific sound like an insult.

The mayor’s sharp white eyes narrowed, and she immediately scanned beyond Slider toward the bushes where Skip and the others were hiding. “Three more,” she called out without hesitation. “Though I can’t see who they are. I assume a reborn Quadrivium?”

From his place in the bushes, Skip felt Andi grip his shoulder. He recalled how the topic of the Quadrivium’s plot on Glory made her tense. He put a reassuring hand on top of hers.
No need to worry,
he told himself more than her.
She can’t see our faces.

“You assume incorrectly,” Edmund Slider told her as if he were talking to a wayward geometry student. “The Quadrivium is no more. The people in the bushes are here to collect me, should you see fit to amuse yourself by posing me on the bridge railing.”

“Our first date was special, Edmund. Sometimes I wish I had gone all the way with you.”

“Yet you spared me. And again, at the beaststalker trial not long ago. And then again at the high school interrogation. Sloppy of you, to keep letting me slip through your fingers.”

“Honestly, I haven’t considered you worth killing. Until tonight.”

“Before you pull your weapon out from under those robes and slice me apart, Your Honor, I thought we might talk.”

Glorianna returned her gaze to the bushes. Skip felt Andi’s breath quicken on his neck. “Dianna told me about her, but I’ve never
seen
her before today,” she whispered. Her hand trembled in his. “Not in either universe. I guess I didn’t realize how old . . . or how much time . . .”

The mayor finally gave up on the bushes. “Talk, then.”

“I propose a cessation of hostilities.”

“Cessation of hostilities? That is completely up to you,” Glorianna growled. “You’ve not endured any hostilities of mine for years, Edmund Slider. And what you did endure, you brought upon yourself by breaking the law. I’ve tolerated your return to this town—as a public school teacher, no less—for the past several months. The only reason you’re not dead is because I didn’t order you killed. I consider that grace
un
hostile. You, meanwhile, conspired to murder me and wipe those who follow me from the earth. Or do you deny participating in this failed scheme?”

“I don’t deny it. And for the record, it did succeed. By my estimate, for about a week.”

“What a wonderful week that must have been for you.”

“I wish I remembered it—this brief seven-day miracle, this world without narcissistic megalomaniacs like Your Honor slicing people’s spines and chopping their heads off.”

“Am I being lectured on morality from a genocidal sociopath? Say what you want about me. I have never asked for more than the safety of the people in and around this town, and those few towns that pay tribute. Dragons have their secret refuge, and they can keep it so long as I never see them. You spiders and scorpions must have your own hiding places. Why do you have to bother the rest of us? Why not forge a universe with bigger rocks to hide under, and leave the rest of us in peace?”

Andi pulled her hand out from under Skip’s and tapped him on the back. “Skip, I should tell you that—”

He shushed her with a wave of his hand. Glorianna’s speech was subversive and disingenuous, but the mayor had undeniable charisma.

“Such noble talk,” Edmund replied. “ ‘A few towns that pay you tribute,’ you say? Shall we go through the list of towns and counties our kind was living peacefully in before your raiding squads came through and purged them? Shall I tell you of my own relatives’ ideas about peace, before they were slaughtered? You and I can only agree on one thing, Glorianna Seabright: We are at war. You prefer to wage it town by town, house by house, bloody stump by bloody stump. The Quadrivium’s approach was painless.”

“And ineffective. Which is the only reason you are bothering to talk now. Can you please get on to your terms for peace, so I may reject them and pin your guts to that fancy chair?”

“Skip, seriously—”

He shushed Andi again, leaning in to see what Slider would say and do.

“Very well,” Slider agreed. “We have three conditions for peace between our peoples. We’ll start with the chair, since you brought it up. Condition number one: We must continue these negotiations eye to eye.”

With that, he leaned forward in his wheelchair, took a deep breath . . . and stood.

Skip swallowed, stunned.
Slider can walk!
Granted, it was not pretty—the man shuffled to keep his balance—but there was no denying what was happening. Without sorcery or physical aid of any kind, a hobbled arachnid had regenerated and risen to face Glorianna Seabright.

He felt a thrill as he watched his teacher, his mentor, and the only father figure who had ever kept his word, break the bonds of the beaststalkers’ most devastating curse. Andi stopped tugging at his sleeve long enough to gasp. Only Aunt Tavia, out of all present, was not surprised. Her eyes watered at the sight on the bridge.

Glorianna did a quick calculation in her head. “I don’t think I want to hear conditions two or three.” She whipped her sword out from beneath her robes and flung it at him.

“Frozen.”
About a foot shy of his face, the sword stopped and hung in midair. “Condition number two. Your Honor will stand and listen until I am done speaking. Though I do appreciate the offer of this sword again.”

“Skip!” The girl’s whisper was harsher.

“Stow it, Andi! Can’t you see what he’s doing out there?”

“Condition number three,” Slider went on as Glorianna fumed. “You and everyone else in this town will not venture beyond its borders, on missions of war or diplomacy or commerce or anything else, until you surrender your weapons and agree to disperse forever.”

“And we will do that because . . . ?”

“Because in this torn, cynical, aging body of mine, I have one good sorcery left.” He flipped his hair, reared back, raised a shining black shoe off the ground, and made a throwing motion in the air.
“Isolated!”

A burst of bright blue exploded in front of him, like a gallon of paint thrown on a window. The hungry shape reached up and out to form a barrier between him and the mayor. It didn’t stop at the bridge—it stretched to brighten the sky and slide down the river in both directions. Within seconds, it had thinned to near invisibility and its surface had extended beyond sight. Skip supposed from its glowing curvature that it formed an enormous dome. His eyes widened. Had Slider just done what he thought?

Glorianna moved forward, pulled the sword out of the air where Slider had frozen it, and stepped up onto the pedestrian walkway to strike him down.

She entered the wall of energy with her blade over her head, but came out the way she had entered, striking nothing but the empty space where she had stood before.

She ran at him again going east, and found herself going west, without touching him.

She threw her sword at him, and had to duck to catch her own deadly boomerang.

“It’s the same from this side, Your Honor. You’ll find this barrier extends around and over the entire town. No one can get in. Or out. Except my friends.” He gestured back to the bushes, coughing. “And this fine Minnesota weather—I’m letting that through, too, as a gift. Everything else stops—troop reinforcements, unfortunate commuters, grocery trucks, gasoline tankers, emergency vehicles, all of it. When you put me in this wheelchair, Your Honor, you put me in a prison. Now I have put you in one. The question is, how long your town—and your rule—will last, once people start starving and freezing?”

Glorianna stood less than three feet from this man, furious beyond words.

“My colleagues can work out the details of your surrender at your leisure, Your Honor.” He wiped sweat from his brow, and took a deep breath. “Naturally, they’ll want to structure the arrangement so that it’s impossible for you to reconstruct later what we dismantle. It may . . . it may require . . .” He coughed again and and shook his head, as if chasing away a bad dream. “It may require certain sacrifices on your part. Starting with your life.”

He staggered a few steps back and sat in his chair. Gray rivulets of sweat seeped into his collar. Too late, Skip recalled something Slider had told Skip earlier that evening.

Power carries a cost.

“No! You can’t—”

He was going to finish with
leave me
, but he found a hand over his mouth and another over his shoulder. Both belonged to his aunt. Her grip on him was fragile, and he could have easily broken it. But when he saw the tears streaming down Tavia’s face, he stayed put.

She knew,
he told himself.

“He told me you might not understand,” she whispered to him from their place in the bushes. “He wanted to tell you earlier. He was afraid you’d try to stop him. He needed all his energy for this one last gift to you.”

“Time,” Skip recalled. “He wants me to have a bit more time.”

She nodded. “And a bit more hope. In a few months, you’ll be almost unstoppable. And no one inside this town will be able to prevent that from happening now.”