Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter
Forty-Seven
I went back into the chamber of the greater circle and went over the sigils again, checking each.
I didn’t really need to, I supposed, if the design had Mab’s seal of approval.
But you don’t do dangerous magic without covering all your bases, period.
So I went around the circle, methodically checking again, each design against its to-scale paper counterpart, one by one, almost in rhythm, ordering my mind for what was to come.
“Lara,” I said, when I was done, “Thomas doesn’t have the same kind of relationship with his Hunger as you have with yours.”
“I’m very aware,” she said.
“That’s why I want you to observe,” I said quietly. “Share any insights you have with me. It could get complicated fast. I might have to make spur-of-the-moment decisions. Your knowledge of them could make a difference.”
I caught Mab staring at me hard as I spoke. I frowned at her. She simply kept staring at me for a moment, then curled her lips into a faint expression of approval and gave me a slow nod.
“I can do that,” Lara said quietly.
“Mab,” I said, “Lara’s Hunger was difficult for me to handle. I might need to borrow power to manage Thomas’s. I think it would be useful if you stood ready to loan it to me.”
“Yes,” Mab said, her voice faintly impatient. “I know precisely how I will be most useful and why you invited me to participate. I have brought all that is necessary.”
“Okay,” I said. “Time for my ritual clothing.”
I went over to my bag and took out a black T-shirt featuring Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots across the front, stripped out of my shirt, and put the new one on. I added to that a pair of aviator sunglasses I’d given Thomas a few years back, along with a White Sox baseball cap he’d owned.
Lara looked at me and smiled faintly. “I’m a minority owner of the team, you know,” she said.
I glanced at her and sighed. “Of course you are.” I took up my wizard’s staff, the one I’d carved new from a lightning-struck oak on this very island, looked over the circle once more, and took a slow breath.
“Alfred,” I breathed. “Please move my brother’s crystal into the circle.”
Silence rang around the chamber for the space of a long breath.
Then the floor began to rumble as the genius loci of Demonreach reacted to my request. In the center of the circle, in one half of the infinity symbol, a slender column of crystal began to arise from the floor.
My brother lay in it, his eyes closed, his face twisted into a rictus of pain, his body tensed into an agonized arch.
“Oh,” Lara breathed. “Empty night, Harry. His Hunger. It was tearing into him when you froze it last.”
“I know,” I said quietly.
“He’s in pain,” Lara said. “I can feel it from here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “When I bring him out of the stasis, I’m going to have to act fast.”
Mab paced slowly around the exterior of the circle, tilting her head this way and that, staring at my entombed brother. “Power alone will avail you naught, I think, my Knight.”
I frowned at her. “Why do you say that?”
“Imagine a beast set upon a child,” she said, “its claws and teeth sunk in. Simply tearing it away will rend the child asunder as it is done. Precision is as much needed as power.”
“Super,” I said. “Great. Right in my wheelhouse. Dammit.”
Mab smirked. “In addition,” she said, “we have little time. The island’s spirit has slowed the passage of time to an intense degree within the stasis crystal but cannot stop it entirely.
Your brother’s life has been ripped from him very slowly but surely over months.
It might be too late already. Had you waited another moon, it certainly would have been.
” She shook her head. “When he is released, the Hunger will be in the very act of ending his life. In my judgment, you will have seconds. At most.”
“Seconds?” I demanded. “Oh, come on.”
Mab gave me a frosty smile. “I will not be able to lend you power,” she said calmly. “I will have to stretch those seconds to give you more room in which to operate. It will require all of my focus.”
“Stretch time?” I asked. “You can do that?”
“Theoretically,” she mused. “Yes. Though I will admit, it has not been necessary to attempt a working so severe before today.”
“Severe? How severe are we talking?” I asked.
“Expect extended consequences,” she murmured.
“Ah,” I said. “Fantastic. Because I never have enough of those.”
“Harry?” Lara said uncertainly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This doesn’t change anything. We’re still doing this.”
Mab glanced at Lara with a kind of wry certainty. “Dogs bark. Scorpions sting. And my Knight pursues his folly.”
“Mab,” I said, and gestured with my right hand.
The Queen of Air and Darkness inclined her head and took position a step behind me and one to my right.
“Lara,” I said, gesturing with my left.
Lara looked uncertain, but she mirrored Mab on the other side.
A single breath can change everything.
I took a slow, deep breath and cleared my mind.
Then I gestured with one hand, murmured, “Flickum bicus,” and set the ritual candles and incense alight.
The floor shivered with sudden power as light spread through the anchoring crystals, catching the candlelight and sending it blazing in nearly coherent beams, describing a pentagram between the inner and outer circle.
I took another breath, sent out a murmur of my will, and brought the greater circle to life. The runes began to blaze green-gold, reflected everywhere in the dome of crystal around us, again and again in sharp relief and at varied depths throughout the translucent stone.
I bowed my head, pressed the forefinger of my right hand to the spot between and just above my eyebrows and breathed out to whoever or Whoever might be listening, and said, simply, “Please.”
Then I opened my eyes, and with it, my Sight.
The Sight goes by a lot of names—the Third Eye, True Sight, there’s a hundred different phrases from a hundred different cultures, but they’re all talking about the same thing.
Some people can see more of the universe than others, see the supernatural energies that flow through all of reality.
When it comes to wizard-level practitioners, the Sight shows you all kinds of things, and there’s a lot of overlap with the soulgaze.
You can see things that are terrifyingly true, but your brain has a lot of built-in defenses, and as a result sometimes you experience things through the filters your mind throws up to keep you from being harmed—because everything you See is permanent.
It stays right there in your head, and time never rubs off the rough edges of the memories.
Look at the wrong thing with your Sight and you could quite easily be driven mad, swiftly and permanently.
I was taking a huge risk here. But using my Sight would tell me more about what was happening to Thomas, would let me better understand and direct my power, and I wanted every advantage I could get.
I had braced myself against what I would be looking at, but even so, I reeled at the sheer, overwhelming complexity of the patterns of power that now hummed throughout the circle, the sigils, and the crystalline dome around me.
I could see how the anchor crystals both fractured and focused the energy of the circle, the sparkling crackles of small but inevitable energetic inefficiencies, sending stray beams of violet and azure energy that tinged the edges of the green and gold working of the circle.
And, within the crystal imprisoning my brother, I saw the field of deliberate scarlet stasis, sheer, viscous, redshifted time that had been slowed.
It dragged at the edges of my brother’s image as it struggled to stay connected to the rest of the universe around it, the strain upon the very fabric of reality showing as faint, delicately crazed cracks in the crystal imprisoning him.
His pale body was strained, muscles taut against his skin, veins pressed against the surface.
He’d been gaunt when I’d passed him to Demonreach’s caretaking, his body eating itself to repair the damage that had been inflicted on him at the hands of the vengeful svartalves, and every muscle and tendon showed through his pale skin, while his dark hair hung lank about his head and face.
I could read the pain and the terror in his expression and body as easily as any book.
I Saw how much my brother was suffering in that moment.
And I Saw his Hunger.
The demon was huge, towering over him, behind him, within him, a starving mass of bone and emaciated skin straining against lean muscle, pallid as a corpse and terrible and viciously hungry.
I could see one of its withered hands clutching his throat, the other wrapped within Thomas’s body, encircling his lower spine, while its jaws, sporting something that looked more like serrated ridges than fangs, closed upon one of his shoulders.
“Hear me, Outsider,” I said, pouring my will into my voice. The crystal rang with it, the words resounding in sheer, penetrating resonance more than in simple volume. “I forbid thee from doing harm to Thomas Raith. I forbid thee. I forbid thee!”
And on the third repetition, the crystal imprisoning my brother and his demon shattered into light and shrieking sound and a world-weight of pain and savage need thundered down upon me, all at once.
The demon’s silver eyes whipped toward me, met mine, and through the perception of my Sight I could feel myself, my true, core self, drawn forward, into the circle, into a maelstrom of sheer havoc and terror as the demon lunged toward me, leaving my physical body standing at the circle’s edge, splitting my awareness into two places at once.
I could See my energetic form from the perspective of my physical body and feel both of them acting at the same time, doubling the disorientation of all that sensory input.
So I had that going for me.