Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) Page 3

  In seconds my sword felt as if it had been embedded in about half a ton of lead. I managed to shift it to my left hand, but I could feel the poison flowing chillingly in my veins; it would not be long before my left arm also began to succumb.

  Keeping my blade between me and Morgan, I took an unsteady step backward and made a quick opening in the fire shield for the real Vanora to step through—except that there was no one there. Morgan, already shifted back into her normal form, laughed heartily at my obvious confusion.

  “You aren’t the only one who can find new uses for magic,” said Morgan, smiling brightly at me as if we were best buds. “I was doing more or less the magic equivalent of throwing my voice. You were hearing me and even sensing me outside, but really I was inside with you the whole time.”

  It now seemed I had no alternative to killing Morgan if I wanted to protect Carla and Gianni. The problem was that my mind was becoming just as sluggish as my body. I knew I could theoretically shoot fire from my sword in a concentrated burst and scorch her right where she stood, but using both “fire shield mode” and “laser blast” mode at the same time was a little tricky to do under ideal conditions, let alone now, with my brain quickly losing its focus. Nor could my faltering brain figure out how to drop the fire shield quickly enough to blast Morgan before she could dodge away. I dimly realized that the storm raging around us was shredding the fire shield anyway, but I couldn’t get myself to concentrate on countering that damage either. Icy rain was splattering my face now, but I could barely feel it. The same rain hit the sword and raised another steam cloud, but I just stared at it. I could see the sword was sputtering and would soon go out, yet I did nothing.

  Suddenly my willpower was melting faster than ice in the Sahara. I also knew I should try to counter the poison, but I could not seem to summon any energy to do that either. My sword slid from my nerveless fingers and clattered on the hospital steps. The flames gave up their futile struggle against the rain as soon as I was no longer wielding the sword, and the pathetic remnant of my fire shield fizzled out. I knew that my life, too, would soon be fizzling out.

  The rain and wind hit me hard enough to push me to my knees. In what seemed an instant in my half-dead state, but might have been a little longer, Morgan was standing right above me, looking down and smiling her death-promising smile. The storm eased, but not the fog, which engulfed us and made it hard for me to see even Morgan—unless the poison was now blurring my vision.

  “My little cherub, you have dropped your sword,” she said in mock-sorrow, picking up White Hilt. It would not flame for her, but she was taking no chances that I might somehow manage to grab it long enough to launch one last fire attack.

  I knew she could not read minds as I could, but she could read my fear in my eyes well enough.

  “Taliesin, do you really think I mean to kill you? Had that been all I wanted, I could just as easily have struck you with the lightning several minutes ago. You know that as well as I do.” I did know that much, even though my thoughts were moving as swiftly as stone. For that matter, Morgan could have plunged her trusty dagger through my heart right then and finished the job. I could not have lifted a finger to stop her.

  Then, even stranger than Morgan not killing me, she caught me as I nearly fell forward on my face and laid me out, with what felt like gentleness, face-up on the steps. The steps beneath me were cold and wet, but it was better to lie face-up than face-down.

  “The potion on the dagger is not poison. It is just a little liquid enchantment I brewed up to take the fight out of anyone who might try to stop me. You will recover from it in a few hours.” Morgan smiled again at the mute question in my eyes. “Maybe I have…what do they call it today? A ‘soft spot’ for you. Or maybe I think your special skills may yet prove useful to me. You may not be any match for me in battle, Taliesin, but you certainly have mastered some aspects of magic that are still beyond me. Who knows at what point I might need something done that only you can do?”

  It was hard to reconcile Morgan’s attitude with what I could remember of her from my life as the first Taliesin—or even from my previous encounters with her in this one. When Ceridwen had temporarily trapped us in Morgan’s part of Annwn, Morgan had seemed willing enough to put all of us at risk to get what she wanted, and she had nearly killed my friend Shahriyar in the final battle with Ceridwen. For her to change so much meant that she really must have found a use for me. Well, whatever it was, I knew I wasn’t going to like it.

  “Rest now,” said Morgan, leaning over and stroking my hair. “Our paths will cross again. Perhaps then you will be more…cooperative.” She leaned over even farther and gave me the very slightest kiss on the cheek. I would have shuddered if I had been able to. Even more frightening, however, was the fact that then she stood up, stepped away from me, and started toward the hospital.

  Carla! Gianni!

  With a colossal effort, I managed to raise my head enough to see Morgan, standing before the front door of the hospital, arms upraised, her black hair and white samite gown rippling a little in the wind that was all that remained of the earlier storm. She was chanting something in Welsh. Not exactly an invisibility spell, but a spell to keep her from being noticed. Morgan had only recently started exploring the modern human world, but clearly she had seen enough to know that a strikingly beautiful woman striding down the hospital wearing a white gown and carrying a long sword would draw a little unwelcome attention.

  Morgan finished the spell and then started to struggle with the hospital door, which I had jammed earlier. Unfortunately, it did not take her long to undo my spell, and then she swept through the door and was gone.

  I had to get up, but I could not make my muscles work. Even sitting up proved impossible.

  The one thought that comforted me was that Morgan had used enough magic beating me to be pretty worn out herself—but how much magic would she need to hurt someone who got in her way? And what would happen when she found her long-lost sister?

  I tried again to sit up. My muscles twitched a bit but still felt like over-cooked spaghetti. I tried to reach out psychically, but my mind moved in slow motion, and I did not get even the slightest echo of a connection with anyone. Even if I had managed some faint contact, that would not have helped Carla or Gianni.

  Wait! Was that a whiff of the intensely fresh air from Annwn that I felt against my cheek, or was it just my foggy wits playing tricks on me? No, it was real, because suddenly Nurse Florence was bending over me, her eyes betraying her anxiety over my condition. Behind her I could make out Stan Schoenbaum and Dan Stevens, my two oldest friends, even though Dan and I had gone through a four-year-long period of hostility, now forgotten. Then I saw Carlos Reyes, Shahriyar Sassani, and Gordy Hayes, three newer, but still very close, friends. Collectively, they were my warriors, for lack of a better way of putting it. Each one had met the challenge of Gwynn ap Nudd, the king of the Welsh faeries, and in consequence each one wielded a magic sword, and each was tied to me by a tynged (binding spell) set up by Nurse Florence and willingly accepted by them.

  Well, Morgan, let’s see you beat all five of them! Let’s see you out-cast Nurse Florence!

  I don’t know why, given how grave our situation was at this moment, but my mind wandered into thinking about how the group didn’t exactly look like the well-oiled fighting machine it was. The guys looked like the high school students they were. Sure, four of them were long-time athletes, with Stan a much more recent recruit. They were all more or less well-muscled. Well, to be honest, Shar was the “more,” practically a body builder, and Stan was the “less,” though he had been working out enough to not look quite like the mathlete he had always been. Otherwise, they looked more like the cast of a commercial to get more girls to attend Santa Brígida High School than like elite fighters. None of them were exactly “pretty boys,” but Dan did have that kind of smile that could melt a female heart, Carlos was reputed to be the reason so many girls came to water polo games, Shar ju
st needed to flex a couple of times to get girls ready to walk barefoot over broken glass for him, and Gordy seemed to be with a different cheerleader every time I saw him. Even Stan was regarded as cute by many of the girls—sort of the nerd-with-possibilities type who appears so often in movies and ends up proving to be the better guy than the star jock at the end.

  And Nurse Florence? What can I say? Natural blond hair (but certainly not someone who fit the “dumb blond” stereotype), face like an angel, body like a Playboy model. She didn’t look like the fearless battlefield healer she became when the occasion called for it. She looked much more like someone high school males would fantasize about. There I could speak from personal experience…

  It was then that I was jolted back to reality when I noticed that Carlos’s left sleeve was torn, and the edges of the rip were bloodstained. I blinked, trying to process what I was seeing. Actually, all five were bloodied, though not always with their own blood, or so I hoped.

  Well, that explained what had taken them so long. They must have run into trouble of some kind on the way.

  Nurse Florence had her hands on my shoulders, letting her mind scan my body. I knew that was what she must be doing, though I couldn’t feel her probing as I normally could.

  “He’ll live,” she began, directing her remarks to my anxious friends, “but he has a very nasty spell keeping him all but paralyzed physically and too weak mentally to use magic. It will take me time to break something this strong. The five of you need to go in and stop Morgan from whatever she is trying to do.” I wanted to second her suggestion, but I couldn’t force words out. “Oh, and try to retrieve Tal’s sword if you can,” she continued. “Morgan seems to have taken it.”

  Each one took the time to give me an encouraging pat on the shoulder and then rushed in without a word. I couldn’t help but feel proud of how well they worked as a team now. I wanted to go in with them, but Nurse Florence was right—I wasn’t going anywhere right now. Well, unless they carried me in, which would be pretty silly in a potential battle.

  Nurse Florence spent a little time on the nick on my arm, which she healed fairly quickly. Breaking the spell was much harder, just as she had suspected. As she chanted quietly in Welsh, I kept reassuring myself that the guys had the situation handled, that I did not need to worry.

  Shahriyar’s sword, Shamshir-e Zomorrodnegar, once wielded by King Solomon and later by the Muslim demon slayer, Amir Arsalan, had among its other distinctions the fact that it made the wielder immune to all hostile magic and that it could cut through and dissipate magical effects. That one blade by itself might well be enough to defeat Morgan, and the fact that Shar, even before his combat training with me, had been pure muscle and very successful in both boxing and mixed martial arts made him a very formidable adversary. Facing a spell casting opponent, in fact, he was more likely to prevail than I was, though I hated to admit that (male ego, you know!)

  Then there was Carlos’s sword, faerie-forged for him personally. One scratch from his blade, and his opponent would start running out of oxygen as if the enemy were drowning. Dan’s sword, also faerie-forged just for him, kept him from bleeding from any wounds he suffered, much as Excalibur’s scabbard used to do before it was lost. Gordy’s sword, yet another faerie-forged and personalized blade, struck fear into any enemy when it was drawn, though a typical spell caster would be too strong-willed to be overcome by the sword’s effect.

  Stan’s sword, like Shar’s but in contrast to all the others, was “pre-owned”— but since the original owner had been King David, Stan couldn’t really complain too much. Govannon, the faerie smith, had added to it the ability to make Stan’s body as muscular as Shar’s—a big bonus at a point when Stan had been more nerdy, and even now, though Stan was working out a lot more, the sword still added visibly to his muscle mass, making him much more effective in combat. Of course, the fact that Stan also had a brilliant mind didn’t hurt either. Given the chance, he could out-think most opponents, even a good many of the supernatural ones.

  So why was I worrying? Surely the five of them could stop Morgan in her tracks. Yeah, surely. But I still shuddered at the thought. I had underestimated opponents before, and I had the horrible feeling that Morgan had at least one other surprise in reserve.

  Suddenly a tremor ran through my whole body. Nurse Florence was trying to break the spell, but it was fighting back with unusual intensity. It felt like a thorn-bush inside of me, with a thorn digging into each cell, as Nurse Florence fought to extract it. I had to clench my teeth to keep from screaming as it writhed within me, tearing into anything it could in an effort to stay put.

  Nurse Florence looked into my eyes. “Tal, I’m sorry this hurts so much, but I don’t know how else to do this. Morgan evidently spent a lot of time crafting this…thing. It is every bit as determined as she is to get what it wants. It does seem dependent on whatever substance Morgan got into your arm wound, though, and that will dissipate eventually. We could wait until it runs its course…”

  I wanted to shout “NO!” I wanted at least to shake my head vigorously. All I could manage was the slightest side-to-side motion, but Nurse Florence knew me too well not to know what I wanted.

  “All right, Tal. Hang on. This will take a few more minutes, but those minutes will feel like hours. Since the pain is magical, deadening your normal pain responses won’t stop it.” With that, Nurse Florence went back to trying to pull the spell out by its roots, and I went back to gritting my teeth.

  After what seemed a piercing red eternity, I felt the last of the thing’s thorny branches wither away. Despite myself, I gasped audibly, but now at least my muscles started responding again, and I was able to sit up. I glanced over at Nurse Florence, who looked back at me wearily.

  “I’m surprised you kept from screaming.”

  “The one advantage of the paralysis,” I replied, trying, but not quite succeeding, to give her a facetious smile. “Am I good to go?”

  “Tal, you are going to be weak for a while. After all of that struggling, I don’t have enough energy myself to lend very much to you. However, if you take it easy—”

  “Yeah, that’ll happen,” I quipped, attempting to jump to my feet—“attempting” being the operative word. Oh, I managed to get to my feet, but very slowly and very shakily.

  “You aren’t really combat-ready, and you don’t have White Hilt.”

  “I’m going in anyway,” I replied, not quite managing the self-confident tone I wanted but at least not sounding as if I were going to faint at any moment.

  Nurse Florence, though pretty worn-out herself, took charge of weaving a concealment charm around us, and then we moved into the hospital, more slowly than I would have liked, but as fast as I was able.

  The security guard at the front desk was slouched back in his chair, eyes shut, snoring loudly. Morgan’s work no doubt. Somehow he must have noticed her coming in. Perhaps the door opening gave her away. I’d seen that guy before, and I had noticed he seemed very alert for someone whose job was, for the most part, routine.

  The good news was that no nurses were running for the exits and screaming in terror. The bad news was that the place was as silent as death, aside from the occasional monitor beep. I wasn’t sure whether not being able to hear the guys was good news or bad news. The lack of swords clanging in the distance suggested no ongoing battle—but did that mean the guys hadn’t been able to find Morgan or that the battle was already over? If it were the latter, the silence betrayed no hint about who had won.

  Both Nurse Florence and I let our minds reach out. Morgan could probably conceal herself from me, especially considering the shape I was in, but at least I could find the guys, and so I did—in Carla’s room…with Morgan.

  My heart started beating so hard it felt as if it might rip right out of my chest. I did the best I could to run, but my steps were maddeningly slow and just a little shaky on top of that. Worse, by the time I reached Carla’s room, my breath was coming out in ragged gas
ps.

  When Nurse Florence and I arrived, Morgan was on the far side of Carla’s bed, and the guys were on the side closest to the door, every muscle tensed, ready to throw themselves at Morgan as soon as they could. The reason they had not already charged her became immediately apparent when I got close enough to realize that she had a solid grip on Gianni, and with her other hand, she was holding her dagger to his throat. He wasn’t struggling; in fact, he seemed to be asleep, probably courtesy of Morgan’s magic. He must have sneaked back into his sister’s room to wait for me, and Morgan had found him there.

  The big question now was why Morgan went to Carla’s room in the first place. There seemed to be only one answer: she had a definite plan that required my help, and she knew exactly how to get me to cooperate.

  Have you ever seen your worst nightmare come to life right in front of you? Well, now I had, in living color—hell, in 3-D.

  Whatever Morgan wanted, it had to be evil. Yet how could I refuse her anything when she could kill Gianni with one flick of the wrist. She might be a soulless witch, but she was pretty good with a knife, and there was still that faerie speed to contend with.

  “I can probably save Gianni even if she cuts his throat,” thought Nurse Florence, knowing that Morgan couldn’t hear our thoughts.

  “Probably isn’t good enough!” I shot back. Anyway, I knew how much energy Nurse Florence had needed to expend on breaking the spell on me. If Morgan seriously hurt Gianni, Nurse Florence would have to struggle with his injury and with the effects of the potion that would get in through his wound. She was good, but even she probably couldn’t pull that off, especially when she so desperately needed rest.